Julius Bissier

Julius Bissier is a German painter born in 1893 in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany) and died in 1965 in Ascona in Ticino (Switzerland).

He took courses at the Karlsruhe School of Fine Arts. In 1927, the meeting with the sinologist Ernst Grosse proved decisive for his work. He developed an abstract calligraphic style. He taught in Friborg from 1930 to 1933. He discovered Constantin Brâncuşi during a trip to Paris. In 1949 he founded the Zen group. His work, exemplary of the abstraction of the 1950s-1960s, a period when abstract painting triumphed, can be linked to the movement of gestural painting of a contemplative nature, illustrated in particular by Mark Rothko and Mark Tobey, of whom Bissier was a friend at the time. end of his life. In 1956 he began painting “miniatures" in delicate colors in tempera: abstract signs on small pieces of canvas. He exhibited in the major museums of Europe and America, at the Venice Biennales (1958-1960), at the Documenta in Cassel (1959 and 1964). In 1961, he settled permanently in Ascona.

An abstract painter until then in tune with his times, he made a break in 1930 and began making Indian ink washes until 1947. He then developed a personal technique - egg tempera and in oil - which gives color a concrete and abstract function in a painting called a miniature.