WEISSE KOMPRESSION AUS KOMPLEMENTÄRFARBEN 1964

This is WEISSE KOMPRESSION AUS KOMPLEMENTÄRFARBEN by Max Bill, with it's clean lines and crisp colours, you just know this was made by a designer. Looking closely, it's easy to see the hand of the artist. Not a computer in sight! The textures and tones are not perfectly flat. In the red section, you can see the direction of the brushstrokes, horizontal, left to right. This shows the process of the painting - this is not a machine-made object. Although Bill was Swiss, he studied at the Bauhaus. In this painting, you see the influence of artists like Josef Albers, with the emphasis on the interplay of colour relationships within geometric structures. But Bill also made sculpture, and there’s something about the object-like presence of this piece, the way it sits there, so solid and bright, that makes me think, ultimately, of architecture.