1954 to 1968

In rural East Westphalia, Sandforth had a hard time following up on his first successes in Munich, as here in the provinces he lacked cultural institutions, museums and, above all, exchanges with colleagues. In order to secure a livelihood for his family in addition to the salary of his wife, who had taken up a job as an art teacher, he accepted numerous commissions for the design of reliefs, mosaics, murals and concrete stained glass windows in public spaces until the end of the 1960s.^[16] Nonetheless, the craftsmanship suited him and he gained a feeling for the surface, which was not without influence on his later large-format paintings. An albeit not entirely new theme for him was the industrial landscape. Around 1962, he created his work Winding Towers after studying, among others, Fernand Léger and his painting Les Constructeurs. Towards the end of the 1950s Sandforth was inspired by Giorgio Morandi for another subject, still lifes.

On Elba, 1959

Sandforth spent November 1956 on Elba for the first time, again together with Seidl-Seitz. Impressed by the island's landscape, he made countless sketches in which the artist geometrised individual elements of the nature surrounding him and thus simplified them on paper until he virtually typified them. In 1958, he went on a study trip to Elba, Ischia, Rome and Naples with Paul Schneider, a fellow student from his time in Kassel, who had become his brother-in-law and friend in the meantime, in order to find new motifs and to work more deeply on his own formal language.

Another of Sandforth's companions was the Ahlen artist and art teacher Hermann Schweizer, with whom Sandforth repeatedly exchanged ideas. In 1961, Sandforth went on a study trip to Greece with him and Paul Schneider, which was extraordinarily inspiring for all of them. For Sandforth, the view of the fascinating architecture of Santorini was "the decisive impetus to depart from spatiality and from now on to place the structures increasingly in the surface. ... Santorini therefore possibly only gave Sandforth the final impulse to concretely push ahead with his development from now on with a different consciousness."^[17]

Whereas Sandforth had already found a reduced and clear formal language based in the pictorial tradition of New Objectivity, his art now developed more strongly into a Constructivist form characterised by more austere pictorial architecture. The landscape paintings and graphic works shown at a solo exhibition in 1963 bear witness to this. This creative cycle also includes drawings of rocky cliffs on Bornholm, motifs from Elba and the Cyclades, from Lake Garda and from Holland. Hermann Schweizer describes in a text for an exhibition in 1973, at which Sandforth brought these pictures together under the title "Study Trips of a Painter", that Sandforth was particularly attracted to the places on Bornholm and Lake Garda "where the ordered crystalline structure of the rocks became visible in its clear, naked form and the variety of its gradations."^[18]

Concertante, 1968

Sandforth's development into a predominantly constructivist painter can be considered complete when looking at his paintings and the years in which they were created. He painted his last representational picture in 1982, a still life, which he revised again around 2000. Another remarkable feature is his new application of paint. He often used hardboard, painting not the smooth side as usual, but the rough side, which by its structure does not allow a smooth application of paint. "He applies the paint, spatulas layers of paint over it, smooths them out again, applies layers of paint again, some of them thin and translucent, until an inherently structured surface emerges with a depth effect that gives the work its liveliness. Often areas of varying density lie next to each other to increase the tension in the painting and Sandforth takes days, weeks, even months to apply this paint."^[19].

Overall, the 1960s can be seen as a period of orientation as far as his painterly development is concerned. Sandforth only participated in isolated exhibitions at this time, so that self-discovery and reinvention could predominantly take place in concentrated work.^[20]

The active years 1969 to 1979

The new period began with six exhibitions. In the summer of 1969, Sandforth exhibited five paintings as a member of the artist group "arcus" in the municipal museum Herford. In autumn 1969, works by Sandforth and Herbert Schlimgen were presented in the rooms of the Deutsche Bank in Gütersloh. In the autumn of 1970, another exhibition was held together with other members of arcus at Ringenberg Castle. In 1971, the exhibition New Art in an Old Abbey was held at Liesborn Abbey. At the exhibition Artists from East Westphalia at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Sandforth was represented in 1969 and 1971.^[21] Here Sandforth showed for the first time a group of 15 abstract works. "In these paintings he had concretised his formal language in a short period of time and created works that are consistently characterised by a great harmony and balance."^[19]

On the occasion of the artist's 50th birthday in 1972, Bernhard Rest, chairman of the Art Association, organised a solo exhibition at Liesborn Abbey. As a new work, Sandforth showed here the painting Cross in an Oval, with which he thematised the cross form for the first time, which he henceforth took up again and again in a pure form that does not allow any association with the Christian cross to arise.

In 1973, Sandforth again undertook a journey to the Lofoten Islands off the coast of Norway together with Paul Schneider and Hermann Schweizer. The gorges and massive rock formations that filled his sketchbooks fascinated him so much that he set off there again in 1976. The oil paintings based on the sketches were then created in the studio at home in a simple, matter-of-fact reduction. The paintings from the first trip, which were, however, created in the studio and not directly in front of nature, were presented by the artist under the title "Sketches from the North".

Rock Architecture, 1978

In the early 1970s, Sandforth met the painter Fritz Winter, who is one of the most important German representatives of abstract painting. Although Winter was 17 years older than Sandforth, the two quickly found a close exchange. Winter had already been involved with abstract painting for many years and had found his own abstract pictorial solutions. In 1975 he introduced Sandforth to his niece Helga Gausling, who lived in Ahlen and opened the Fritz Winter House there in the same year. Among other things, Sandforth helped to set up her first art exhibition in 1978 and subsequently held numerous exhibitions there himself, including frequent solo exhibitions.

At the end of 1979, Sandforth set off on a trip to the south of France, where he also visited Antibes and Aix-en-Provence. As he had done during his time as a prisoner of war, he was captivated by the sun-drenched landscape. He returned to his studio with a large number of watercolours and sketches.

By purely quantitative standards, the seventies were the most artistically active years in the artist's life. Sandforth participated in 23 exhibitions and contested 5 solo exhibitions.^[22] The catalogue of paintings alone shows 170 new works, from architectural and relief works to layered stencils, with a clear pictorial structure and his highly individual abstracting formal language.^[23][24]

The quieter 1980s

Casarini, 1994

In 1979 Sandforth met the painter Heinrich Siepmann (1904–2002), one of the most important representatives of the German post-war avant-garde. As a friend for many years, Siepmann exerted no small influence on Sandforth's further development as a painter, based on similarities in his life, in his conception of art in general and in questions of pictorial form and composition. This decade is marked by greater calm: fewer exhibitions, less travel, a reduced number of new paintings. It seems as if Sandforth needed the quiet in the studio to question his own artistic expression, to develop it further and to arrive at new strictly non-representational, constructivist pictorial ideas. The relationship of the forms to each other and to the overall pictorial architecture runs thematically through the early works of the 1980s.^[25] The first work in strict symmetry, Gegeneinander mit Halbrunden in der großen Fassung, he still signs in the centre front. Sandforth extended the ambivalence between calm and tension in the structure of the individual pictorial elements by introducing a vertical line as an accentuating moment in his paintings. In these works, one can see how the painter struggles for a balance in the picture, how the rising or sinking form is brought into harmony, how colour surfaces and surface boundaries circle each other.^[26] And finally, he moves from abstract art towards Art Concret after Theo van Doesburg: Nothing is more concrete than a line, a colour, a surface. For Sandforth, however, harmony, regularity and balance are also part of it. His paintings with a few colour surfaces offset against each other create a harmonious spatial structure.^[27]