{"id":4493,"date":"2012-02-12T23:48:33","date_gmt":"2012-02-12T22:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/?p=4493"},"modified":"2012-02-13T10:36:27","modified_gmt":"2012-02-13T09:36:27","slug":"the-fantastic-four-zurich-concrete-art-and-special-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/?p=4493","title":{"rendered":"The Fantastic Four: Zurich Concrete and Special Friends."},"content":{"rendered":"
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http:\/\/www.frieze.com\/issue\/review\/the-fantastic-four-zurich-concrete-and-special-friends\/<\/a><\/p>\n
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The Fantastic Four: Zurich Concrete Art and Special Friends, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich<\/a>. Expo en novembre 2011, dommage. Pour m\u00e9moire. Pour se fixer les id\u00e9es sur l’art concret, hier et aujourd’hui.<\/p>\n

The traces, shadows and aftershocks of Concrete art<\/span> \u2013 and, in particular, the Zurich Concrete school<\/span> \u2013 have been seen and felt everywhere in contemporary Swiss art production, with its emphasis on hard-edged, geometric abstraction. The term \u2018Concrete Art\u2019, coined in 1930 by Theo Van Doesburg in a manifesto written for the first issue of Art Concret, defined and delineated a departure from realism, nature and symbolism. Its reductionist principles of line, colour and plane organized into austere, systemic wholes \u2013 themselves copped and refined from the Bauhaus and De Stijl \u2013 were meant to \u2018represent abstract thoughts in a sensuous and tangible form\u2019, as Max Bill, the movement\u2019s ringleader, once wrote<\/span>. Concrete art was intended to create new \u2018object[s] for intellectual and spiritual use\u2019<\/span>.
\nIf such sincere proclamations sound a tinny Utopian alarm today, the kind of reduced, geometrically-prone art they proposed remains insistently de rigueur, from the Neo-Geo antics of French Switzerland (led by godfather John Armleder<\/span>) to the Northern Swiss gangs of younger Basel and Zurich-based artists<\/span>, who increasingly process Concrete art\u2019s methods through the filters of digitization or consumerism<\/span>. Consequently, the exhibition \u2018The Fantastic Four: Zurich Concrete and Special Friends\u2019 did not come as a particular surprise. At Haus Konstruktiv, the \u2018Fantastic Four\u2019 of the Marvel comic from whence this somewhat cloying title came, are reconfigured as the superheroes of Zurich Concrete: Bill, Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg and Richard Paul Lohse<\/span>. The \u2018special friends\u2019 comprised a motley, intergenerational group of contemporary artists \u2013 among them, Sa\u00e2dane Afif, Bruno Jakob and Shirana Shahbazi \u2013 whose radically disparate production can still be located, at times, in Concrete art\u2019s shadow.
\nHaus Konstruktiv\u2019s permanent collection is notably broad, and the exhibition mostly rode its able shoulders.<\/p>\n

Graeser<\/span>\u2019s lucid oil paintings on canvas, with their grounding in graphic design \u2013 like many of the Zurich Concretes, he worked in all areas of design: furniture, architecture, advertising \u2013 bookend his career. Gestoppte Rotation<\/em> (Stopped Rotation, 1943) proved prescient of the geometric, abstract photography movement of today, while the funny, poignant Drei Farben: drei gleiche Volumen, 1\/12 gr\u00fcn bewegt<\/em> (Three Colours: Three Equal Volumes, 1\/12 Shifted Green, 1975\/76), featured one\u00a0of\u00a0his\u00a0horizontal bands of colour attempting to make a break for it.
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\nLoewensberg<\/span>\u2019s wonderful paintings from the late 1960s and \u201970s, meanwhile, look like radio frequencies or lighting bolts swathed in colour, conjuring computer approximations of Clyfford Still\u2019<\/span>s (more famous) drippy abstractions from\u00a0the same period.<\/p>\n

Bill<\/span>\u2019s revelatory painting of\u00a0powdery pastel hues blossoming from a\u00a0spiral, Betonung einer spirale<\/em> (Accentuation of a Spiral, 1947), however, took the award for sheer timelessness. http:\/\/jlggb.net\/blog\/?p=4388<\/a><\/p>\n

In the wake of such works, the contemporary inclusions were somewhat disappointing and the choices difficult to interpret \u2013 surely there are other Swiss-related artists whose work follows Concrete art more explicitly \u2013 but some of the pairings were nevertheless inspired. Best known for her photorealist, figurative murals rendered by Iranian sign painters, Shahbazi showed large geometric works that were both lovely and surprising. If Killian R\u00fcthemann\u2019s site-specific installations \u2013 playfully dark retorts to geometric abstraction\u2019s legacy \u2013 fit perfectly, Afif\u2019s punk-ish performance documentation was less expected. Still, Concrete art\u2019s intentions to unite art and life in all its ably designed forms bore this contribution out. And should the spectator have persisted in the misguided thinking that this Swiss movement remained regional, there was one scene-stealing side project: a series of sketches, drawings and paintings by Fritz Glarner<\/span> for the famous 1960s-era Rockefeller Dining Room in New York. The artist, who emigrated to the US in 1936, designed the room for Nelson Rockefeller himself, bringing Zurich Concrete \u2013 and Glarner\u2019s own brand of Mondrian-inflected wit, with its jam of flat, hard-edged geometric forms tricked out in blue, red and yellow \u2013 to the most American and yet international of settings.\u00bb Quinn Latimer<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.frieze.com\/issue\/review\/the-fantastic-four-zurich-concrete-and-special-friends\/ The Fantastic Four: Zurich Concrete Art and Special Friends, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich. Expo en novembre 2011, dommage. Pour m\u00e9moire. Pour se fixer les id\u00e9es sur l’art concret, hier et aujourd’hui. The traces, shadows and aftershocks of Concrete art \u2013 and, in particular, the Zurich Concrete school \u2013 have been seen and felt everywhere in … Continuer la lecture de The Fantastic Four: Zurich Concrete and Special Friends.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[212,90,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-couleurs","category-varia-art","category-varia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/uebersicht\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}