Untitled 1965

Max Bill made this untitled print with red, blue, and yellow shapes. It’s like he took a diamond and sliced it right down the middle. I can see Bill carefully plotting each line and angle. He was part of a movement that believed in geometry and abstraction as a way to create universal beauty. There’s a cool, almost detached quality to his work, but I wonder if, while he was making it, he felt something more. Did he feel the weight of those colors, or the satisfaction of getting the lines just right? Bill probably knew about the Bauhaus and De Stijl, the utopian ideas of Mondrian, and he would have been part of an ongoing conversation about what makes a good form, a good color, a good world. I like thinking about the push and pull between order and chaos. It makes me want to go back to my studio and push paint around.