His work Black Skin (Schwarze Haut), was selected to be featured in one of the 100 Great Paintings programmes by the BBC in 1980.

[2] For the last decades of his life, he lived and worked in Düsseldorf and on the Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss, where he died shortly before his 83rd birthday.

From 1954 to 1959, Graubner studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf,[6] where he was first a student of Otto Pankok[7] with Günther Uecker and Bert Gerresheim becoming his classmates.

[28] Among his many Düsseldorf students were Chen Ruo Bing,[29][30] Mechthild Hagemann, Doris Helbling, Jana Vizjak, Hans-Willi Notthoff, Georg Schmidt, Jens Stittgen,[31] Stoya,[32] Martin Streit,[33][34][35] Peter Thol,[36] Ulrich Moskopp,[37] Albert Maria Pümpel,[38] Ingo Ronkholz,[39] Ansgar Skibba[40] and Carl Emanuel Wolff[41] In 1988 the Federal President of Germany ordered two works from Graubner.

[49] They "breathe"; they live; their colors, even though fixed on canvas, have movement that stirs the imagination as much as his "fog-spaces" of the sixties, in which he continued the romantic tradition of Caspar David Friedrich.

[55] Graubner also saw his own work in the tradition of old masters such as Matthias Grünewald, Titian, El Greco and Paul Cézanne.

[56] Berke Inel considers Graubner's "original use of the color-light-space triad" as the "unique aspect" of his work: "The artist presents color to the audience as though it were a landscape," and he always pays attention to detail.

In 1977, the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf presented the exhibition, "Gotthard Graubner: Farbräume, Farbkörper, Arbeiten auf Papier".

In 2000, Graubner's drawings were presented at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and his other works at the Goethe-Institut, Istanbul, the CaixaForum Barcelona and the Ankara State Art and Sculpture Museum.

1960s), Erster Nebelraum – Hommage à Caspar David Friedrich (1968) and further Fog Spaces ("Nebelräume", 1969–1971, 2006–2007).

[60] In 1988, Graubner was commissioned to create two large cushion pictures for the Schloss Bellevue in Berlin.

In 2001, he was awarded the Otto Ritschl Prize that honours a life's work in colour painting.