Max Bill

A leader in the European Concrete Art movement of the 1930s and 1940s, Max Bill was a Swiss artist, designer and architect whose work drew inspiration from Bauhaus, De Stijl, and the work of Le Corbusier. After studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau under artists Joseph Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, Bill returned to Zurich, integrating the principles of Concrete Art, and the theories of Theo van Doesburg, into his highly mathematic paintings, architecture, and industrial designs. After founding the journal Abstrakt Konkret, Bill went on to explore theories of Abstract Constructivism in writings, monographs and catalogues. He founded a collage of art and design, Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung, with Otl Aicher and Inge Scholl and became the head of Architecture and Industrial Design. Throughout Bill’s career he continued to push the boundaries of design and abstraction, teaching throughout Europe and becoming active in various associations and councils of German and Swiss artists, architects and designers.

Bill organized and showed work in several important shows over the course of his career, including the first international exhibition of Concrete Art in 1944 and a 50-year survey in Zurich, 1960. His work was the subject of retrospectives at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City in 1988. His work was shown in Documenta I (1955), II (1959), and III (1964), and his 1951 retrospective at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art deeply influenced an entire generation of Brazilian artists including Franz Weissmann. Bill designed iconic watches and clocks for longtime client Junghans and his large-scale public sculptures, industrial design projects and buildings are still found throughout Europe. In 1951 he was awarded the Grand Prix for sculpture at the Sao Paulo Biennale and the Grand Prix for Swiss pavilion at the Milan Triennale.