In 1980 Quinte called his pictures "Dripping", "Drumming" or "Running". A drum-like application of paint on a yellow-pink background or a black play ribbon, the course of which is connected by dense trickling drops of paint and thus takes on the character of a column, opens up a new, exotic world. Three years later there is a return to gloomy vertical bars, which only show lightening in the middle and at the corners. After that, the gouaches appear lighter and more spiritual in the entire middle section. In 1984 and 1985 the first retrospective wandered through southern Germany, perhaps symptomatic of the art scene in which the north and south imagine a clear division, as much as Lothar Quinte was always present at the Cologne and Düsseldorf art fairs. It showed a focus in the painting of the seventies and eighties as an examination of current tendencies in his art. Lothar Quintes work grows in the confrontation with himself, and so it was clear that this retrospective sparked a discussion in himself about the location of his art. As during the strong media presence in the early 1970s, he took a step back again in order to move forward. He gave up his dripping painting in favor of painting, preferably on burlap, in which - in a recourse to the early window paintings of the sixties - vibrating cushions of paint emerge from the sound field and seem to float above the canvas. Once again, the contrasting color of the bundles takes a back seat in favor of the monochrome, which grew out of gray values ​​between white, black, red and blue. The construction repertoire goes back to the mid-sixties, in which lines, slits and fields motivate the space. Above all, however, thanks to the broader brush densities, the culinary simplicity of his pictures increases and, despite the membrane-like symbols, made it possible to unify the picture into a physically and spatially homogeneous whole. Shape and spatial body are one and, apparently without contradiction, no longer exist as a distinguishable relationship between figure and space.