Artwork of the month September

Gottfried Honegger, Pliage C 57, 1999

Gottfried Honegger

* 1917 in Zurich, † 2016 in Zurich


Pliage C 57, 1999


Metal, epoxy-coated

Height: 260 cm

Donation from the artist

 

Gottfried Honegger counts among the internationally important exponents of concrete art. His work is characterised by limiting the formal means while at the same time maximising freedom of creative action. In this respect he is very different to the "Zurich Concrete Artists" associated with Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, who systematically put into practice the demands that Theo von Doesburg had set out for concrete art in 1931. This included the artwork's freedom of all representational function, i.e. the artwork has no meaning beyond itself in its forms, colours and compositional elements. Honegger also uses clear-cut systems of order, avoiding any reference to the representational function. However, Honegger retained the sensory dimension of aesthetic experience, incorporating this aspect into his works.

Honegger saw his pictorial activity inextricably linked with the world in which it takes place, which is why he dealt consistently with ethical questions. The central concept of his ethical and aesthetic principles is freedom. To him non-objective art was a guarantee of preserving liberty.

Pliage C 57 is part of a body of work whose make-up is characterised by two elements. On the one hand, the artist founds his composition on a basic shape, a rectangle or cylinder. The second step is to make incisions in this shape that either lead to folds, resulting in the final form, or which dissect the basic shape into parts that are then reassembled. These modular sculptures are variable in size. To begin with, they exist as a roughly 40-cm-high cardboard model that forms the basis for translating the shape into the stable sculptural material. The sculptures themselves exist in heights of between 80 cm and 450 cm.

Friedemann Malsch

<b>Gottfried Honegger, Pliage C 57, 1999</b>
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein highlights a work from the permanent collection each month throughout the year. Works from the collection of the Hilti Art Foundation are also included in this series on a regular basis.