Painter, illustrator, and graphic artist Paul Rotterdam (b. 1939) is the Austrian member of the New York School, a group of artists whose radical approaches pushed pure abstraction to its very limits. In the late 1960s, Rotterdam moved to the United States in order to acquaint himself with the theory behind these approaches and to apply it to his own works in a practical way.

Rotterdam is resolute in seeking out expressions of the universal. He proceeds from the theories of classical modernism, ranging from the postulate of free form by the likes of Kandinsky to the constraint of forms by a Piet Mondrian. His paintings achieve a material quality that generates its own reality. For many years, Rotterdam has lived close to nature in order to communicate with it through his art. This book offers a portrayal of an artist whose austere paintings enable us to experience the intrinsic.