Oskar Koller was a German artist best known for his vivid, semi-abstracted watercolors of flowers and trees. Characterized by fluid fields of color, Koller used sprays and blots of paint to create colorful, expressive images of nature. “The joy of painting made me an artist,” he explained of his practice. “I sensed the air; saw the flowers, the people, the houses. I studied their forms.” Born on October 16, 1925 in Erlangen, Germany, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg where he was a student of the painter Hermann Wilheims. In 1957, he won a scholarship to study in Paris where he was introduced for the first time to abstract art, leading to his own experimentation with non-representational forms in his work. He was awarded the Culture Prize of the City of Erlangen in 1983, the first of several national accolades, including the Friedrich Baur Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1994. In 2002, he established a foundation to preserve his work for the public. He died May 17, 2004 in Fürth, Germany, and the municipal gallery of that city went on to hold a major retrospective of his work the following year.