In 1916, Molzahn, who was born in 1892 in Duisburg, a city characterized by Rhenish industry, was still influenced by the Swiss circle of artists around Otto Meyer-Amden, with whom he had a close artistic relationship during his stay in Switzerland. His first solo exhibition was organized by the artist Karl Peter Röhl in Weimar in 1914 - an early sign of Molzahn's growing importance in the reform-oriented art scene. The stylistic proximity to Italian Futurism and its concept of a dynamized pictorial surface is unmistakable in the present work. Still, Molzahn combines these impulses with a structural composition that already points to his later turn towards an organic-geometric pictorial language.