Instinctively with the times. A hundred years of Max Bill

Winterthur 1908. Berlin 1994. Max Bill spanned the 20th century, leaving a vast output that displays a remarkably consistent approach to complex and separate worlds. A student of the Bauhaus, he was perhaps preordained. Even his name stands out like a graphic logo. Undoubtedly an all-round artist, he was a Renaissance man in the truly humanist sense. Guiding him through painting, sculpture, architecture, graphics and design was a steadily perfected compositional method that could be verified and repeated. He stuck to a principle that helped to generate the work but was also its end result. In his view it is not – or not only – the resulting form that matters, but its underlying process and reasoning. One is always surprised by the freshness and contemporaneity of his thinking, not only through its methodological foundations in science, but also through its artistic and formal roots in Euclidean and other geometry. The clarity of his graphic designs, the spatial intuition of his infinite-surface sculptures, and the anti-rhetoric of his architecture have caused him to be cyclically rediscovered and sometimes unconsciously cited.

Winterthur 2008. Max Bill would have been 100. To celebrate the occasion his native city is dedicating a retrospective to him. Among the most complete to have been mounted in recent years, it will be open until May 12 at two different venues. On view at the Kunstmuseum are his paintings and sculptural works; and at the Gewerbemuseum his architecture and original drawings, models and photographs, as well as his industrial design, graphics and publications. The show’s division into two themed areas is not conducive to a broadly interdisciplinary picture, but was necessitated by the large number of exhibits to be accommodated – most of them from the Max, Binia + Jakob Bill Stiftung. This is the first event in Winterthur’s centenary calendar, to be followed by a series of venues and lectures that will reconstruct the multifaceted life of this kaleidoscopic Swiss architect. Roberto Fabbri

Until 12.05.2008
Max Bill
Gewerbemuseum
Kirchplatz 14
CH - 8400 Winterthur
http://www.gewerbemuseum.ch//
Kunstmuseum
Museumstrasse 52
8402 Winterthur
http://www.kmw.ch/

Instinctively with the times. A hundred years of Max Bill

Winterthur 1908. Berlin 1994. Max Bill spanned the 20th century, leaving a vast output that displays a remarkably consistent approach to complex and separate worlds.

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