Gottfried HONEGGER

Biography

Gottfried Honegger, born on 12 June 1917 in Zurich and died on 17 January 2016 in his native city, was a Swiss artist and collector. He lived and worked in Paris, Zurich and Mouans-Sartoux (Alpes-Maritimes).

A painter since 1933, he first pursued a career as an advertising graphic designer.

In 1938, he founded a graphic design, decoration and photography studio, designed exhibition sets, including the 1939 Zurich National Exhibition, and set up the first travelling exhibition of graphic art in Switzerland.

In 1939, the artist moved briefly to Paris, where he produced Cubist landscapes and portraits. He travelled to Scandinavia, Germany and the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, he painted compositions combining references to nature and geometry. In 1958, he went to the United States to New York where he met the abstract expressionists.

He created monochrome paintings whose surface is animated by geometric and repetitive elements of small thickness, which prefigured his "Tableaux-reliefs" and which he presented in his first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York.

In the same year, Gottfried Honegger returned to Paris where he used computers for computer-programmed drawings. There he exhibited and gave up his other activities to devote himself completely to art.

Honegger creates Tableaux-reliefs in monumental formats, in which the distribution of colours and forms is entrusted to the chance of a dice game. Then the Tableaux-reliefs emancipate themselves from the plan of the painting. He also made "Pliages" from metal sheets.

In 1990, he created the Espace de l'Art Concret at the Château de Mouans-Sartoux in the Alpes-Maritimes.

In 2000, he and his late wife Sybil Albers-Barrier donated their art collection of 500 works by 160 artists (abstraction, minimalism, conceptual art) to the French state.

In 2014, he created the stained glass windows of the fourteen upper bays of the nave in Liège Cathedral, with the help of the Chartres master glass artist Hervé Loire.

In 2015, the Musée National d'Art Moderne devoted a retrospective to him at the Centre Pompidou, followed by an exhibition of his latest donation to the museum in 2015.