Mark Rothko was probably the most important artist of abstract color spaces of the 20th century. What is the secret of his art? To this day, Mark Rothko's luminous color fields from the fifties and sixties continue to cast a spell over people. The new episode of Augen zu, the art podcast from ZEIT and ZEIT ONLINE, looks at the artist's life and work. Rothko's life, which finally ended in his suicide in 1970, was one of melancholy and full of manic-depressive storm. In the podcast, Florian Illies and Giovanni di Lorenzo describe how, precisely in his knowledge of doom, he created images that are unsinkable and how the inconsolable is able to provide comfort through his art. The transcendental feeling, she concluded, that grips one in front of this artist's canvases is comparable to the feeling felt by the back figures of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings in the face of nature. The recording of the podcast took place for the first time in front of an audience as part of the exhibition The Form of Freedom.

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