Gottfried Honegger

Gottfried Honegger was born in Zurich in 1917. He lives and works in Paris.

In 1950, he became an Abstract artist, influenced by Zurich's concrete art (Bill, Lohse, Graeser) and American painting (Rothko, Newman), Gottfried Honegger found validation of his work during his stay in New York (1958- 1960), where the gallery Martha Jackson organized the first exhibition of his works in 1960. He settled in Paris afterwards, where he made some researches on painting and sculpture. His paintings are arrangements back up by a system, using relief and monochrome, but the structure and the skin of the work remains particularly worked.

The simple geometric forms that he uses (squares, circles) are arranged inside a regular orthogonal frame according to a pre-established program and always based on calculations. His paintings are made of cardboard pieces posed sharp edged and marouflaged over a canvas, then covered with many layers of paint. The artist gets a relief effect on the surface that catches light and makes the composition changeable. The hollow or relief shapes are sometimes created by incisions, which he calls "Bevellings".

Honegger likes involving chance in the programming of his works and uses the computer or just a dice game for that. In sculpture, which he practices as well since 1968,it prevails the study of volumes, consisting of cubes, spheres and their multiples, as well as the establishment of structures and patterns based on systems.