Max Bill

doppelfläche mit sechs rechtwinkligen ecken, 1948-78

Max Bill – architect, designer, painter, sculptor, commentator and lecturer – defined concrete art as being ultimately “the pure expression of harmonic dimensions and laws”. The mathematical discovery of the Möbius strip, which apparently has only one edge and one surface, interested Max Bill as a sculptor for years. Bill’s analysis of Constantin Brancusi’s Infinite Column (1918-38) led to the sculptural idea of an Endless Loop as early as 1935. Here Bill successfully formalizes a mathematical idea elegantly and lightly, making us forget how heavy the white granite is. In this way, Bill lent infinity a form that is nevertheless limited. “Art needs emotion and thought. (…) Thought makes it possible to order emotional values so that works of art can emerge from them. The primal element of any pictorial work is geometry, relating the layers in two or three dimensions. And so, just as mathematics is one of the essential resources of primary thought and thus of gaining insights into the world around us, it plays the same role among the basic elements of a science of relationships, the way one thing, one group, one movement relates to another, and because it enshrines these elemental things within it, and places them in meaningful relationships with each other, it is obvious that it will present such elements so that they will become image.” (M.B. 1949, quoted from cat. M.B., Locarno 1991, p. 104).