"I want something with colours." is a frequent wish by visitors who want to borrow art from the artothek. Hereby they are expressing their desire for positive, cheerful impulses for their everyday lives. The colourful silkscreen prints, which are among the other great works in the artothek's collection, are certainly not dreary.

Bright, geometric artworks in strong, contrasting colours were purchased for the Cologne artothek collection in the 1970s. Günter Fruhtrunk, Winfred Gaul, Rupprecht Geiger, Georg Pfahler and Lothar Quinte are the well-known artists in this group of works, which is being shown for the first time in this form and which brings a lot of powerful colour into the exhibition space.

The rich colourfulness is also a specific feature of the silkscreen technique, which gained acceptance in the European art scene from the 1950s under the term "serigraphy". Impressed by American Pop Art and Hard Edge painting, many artists experimented with colours, shapes, lines and surfaces. The associated perceptual phenomena are undergoing a practical test and explored in numerous variations. The intense colours are made to glow by combining high-contrast colours or unusual materials - metallic and fluorescent colours, for example - in such a way that the audience can hardly escape their energetically positive effect.