He is one of the most prominent representatives of post-war abstraction in Germany: Fred Thieler. Born in Königsberg in 1916, he became one of the most important painters of "Informel", the lyrical and expressive abstraction in post-war Germany. Persecuted by the Nazis because of his Jewish mother, he enrolled at Hein König's private art school in Munich. After the war, he studied at the Academy in Munich from 1946 to 1950 in the class of Carl Caspar, where he painted his first abstract pictures. Thieler became a member of the ZEN 49 group, which was founded in 1949 and included artists such as Willi Baumeister, Rupprecht Geiger, K.R.H. Sonderborg and Fritz Winter. From 1959 to 1981 he was Professor of Painting at the Berlin Art Academy, now the University of the Arts, and his work was shown at "documenta" II and III in Kassel in 1959 and 1964. Since 1992, the Berlinische Galerie (Berlin's state museum) has awarded the Fred Thieler Prize for Painting, which goes back to a donation by Thieler. He died in Berlin in 1999.

Thieler's forms are abstract, his colors intense. Their dialog determines his pictures. His works do not follow a consistent, systematic stylistic pattern, as is generally characteristic of "Informel". His early works, well into the 1940s, were painted in the conventional manner with brushes and were entirely figurative. The themes are clear: melancholy scenes from everyday life, sometimes rendered in a somewhat more cheerful way, which brings in an element of hope.

Since the 1950s, however, Thieler has worked in a completely different way. He took the canvas down from the easel, laid it flat on the floor and - even more provocatively - poured, dripped and splashed the paint on it, from cans or buckets. There is a certain similarity to Jackson Pollock here, but the two knew nothing about each other at the time. Thieler thus created works that do not depict anything figurative, but rather surprise with their random and unpredictable color arrangements. They appeal to the emotions and radiate energy and dynamism.

Initially, his paintings seemed to be dominated by dark, oppressive colors, mostly based on black or blackish tones. Since the 1960s, he has used more blue and red, making his works more luminous as his oeuvre evolves. The artist also adopted collage techniques, which influenced the free flow of color. Although Thieler later used new shades such as violet, orange or green, his works remain essentially determined by the classic tones of blue, red, white and black.