Georg Karl Pfahler is one of the most important German representatives of a new generation of artists that formed in post-war Germany and found significant and innovative pictorial solutions in the spirit of the awakening of the 1960s. With his works Pfahler gives his own answer to the art of Abstract Expressionism in America. The experience gained under his teacher Willi Baumeister at the Stuttgart Art Academy had a lasting influence on the young Pfahler and developed his sense of the unity of color and space and the simplification of forms.
The works from the early 1950s, which took up Informel, were followed only a little later by the "formative" works, in which the painterly structures are condensed into sharply contoured blocks and areas of color. This phase was replaced by a geometrically more and more solidified formal language, which was limited in the color palette to a few contrasting tones and was reflected in his work cycles of "Metro", "Espan", "Spor", or "Transit" paintings. In 1955 he was still a co-founder of "Gruppe 11", the core group of Informel in Stuttgart, but at the end of the fifties he already began with his block-like-formative works, to which he added the term "Formative" from 1959 and which are characterized by clearly delineated surfaces and reduced color, above all by the use of blue, green, orange, red and black. Here he directly follows Baumeister's late work, especially the paintings of the "Montaru" series: "Pfahler, however, does not need a run-up to this; he is immediately fully there, placing the blocky, condensed elemental color form in the surface from 1959 with such decisiveness that the space-constituting quality of the color block can be called the starting point of later color forms." (Nikolai B. Forstbauer)
Over the course of a few years, his increasingly geometricizing paintings become clearer and sharper in structure and form, so that Pfahler's "blocks of form" begin to transform into sharply delineated areas of color in 1962/63. From the mid-1960s, he finds his way into the art history books as the only German representative of hard-edge or "painting of hard edges." The great recognition value of these predominantly signal-colored, planar paintings is based on Pfahler's singular concept of "color-form painting," which he expanded from about 1965 onward into the sculptural spatial concepts of "color-space objects." The sculpture becomes walkable, conquers the space surrounding it, and becomes space and architecture at the same time. The color as well as the space surrounding it can be experienced directly and in an absolute way. With these revolutionary "color-space projects" he was invited to the Venice Biennale in 1970, which subsequently - with previous exhibitions in Basel, Amsterdam, Bern and New York - brought him international renown. With his consistent advance into "color field painting," Pfahler was able to advance to become the most important German interpreter and pioneer of hard-edge of international standing.