Max Bill

The correspondence between architecture, sculpture, painting and industrial design: Bill's multifaceted creative activity seemed to converge, from the very beginning, towards the achievement of this goal. If the purpose of giving life to an integrated relationship between the arts finds, in the context of modernity, its apical moment in the experience of the Staatliches Bauhaus, Bill is considered one of the most enterprising, and sophisticated, interpreters of him. Already a student, between 1928 and 1932, of the Institute created by Walter Gropius, the artist in turn founded in 1951 the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, with a similar ideological approach: it will also design the buildings, marked, as all his architectural work, from an uncompromising functionalism. Supported by a solid theoretical elaboration, involving a wide range of algebraic and mathematical speculations; faithful to a concretist-style formalism, Bill's pictorial art is a clear expression of concepts such as rationality, simplicity, harmony. The abstract ideas that are at its root are represented by elementary forms of geometric inspiration, lit up by uniformly spread tonal colors. «A painting has, today more than ever, an explicit spatial function. It is a center of irradiation, as well as a source of light or a source of heat. " In addition to illustrating some fundamental aspects of his pictorial conception, this 1951 reflection by Bill himself is also relevant to the works of the Transcoloration aus grün cycle, of which one of the most interesting examples is presented here.