HELMUT FEDERLE
Basics on Composition / Informal Multitudes
“The work depends on something external and the content in my paintings depends only on my visión, my view of the things. It is the dematerialization of a visión. It is a trace and not a proof.”
Helmut Federle (Solothurn, Switzerland, 1944) is one of the most respected European abstract painters of our times. Austere, geometrically organised forms arranged in sequences characterise his practice. With this commitment to abstraction, the artist stands in the tradition of Classical Modernism and its search for spiritual content within non-objective form. Federle has built an oeuvre that aims at striking a balance between geometric construction and painterly gesture. His paintings and drawings attest to a probing investigation of geometric forms in equilibrium with the pictorial surface. Federle conceives painting as a different form of thinking, a ‘kind of instinctive intelligence’ where though, feeling and physical actions converge. Abstraction across times and cultures has been a constant interest to Federle, as he has a genuine conviction that it harbours a spiritual potential.
Informal Multitudes (Amsel im Baum 2. Version), 2020
Acrylic on canvas
70 x 50 cm
Unique piece
The Background Chronicle X (Trace of Informal) (?) (Plus Minus Zero) (Question Mark), 2020
Acrylic on canvas
70 x 50 cm
Unique piece
Informal Multitudes (Duelo a Garrotazos/F. Goya), 2020
Acrylic on canvas
70 x 50 cm
Unique piece
“The questions in these paintings are: Is the light coming forward or is it a passage we are going through toward the light? Maybe it is both. Are we present in front of the painting or are we present in the painting? As Louis Kahn, the architect, said, ‘God is in the material’.”
Basics on Composition J (Dedication: Ezra Pound) (Der Tod der Amsel), 2019
Oil on canvas
40 x 50 cm
Unique piece
“In the late 1970s and early 1980s Federle produced predominantly geometric paintings, grey-black in colouring. Subsequently, he painted several parallel sequences of images with interrelated colour surfaces. In the early 1980s a particular colour appears in his work, a kind of mercurial green-yellow that is being associated with angst. Since 1994, Federle has worked with variations on a picture format with a pale-coloured rectangular form (his Corner Field Paintings). It’s specially recurrent the use of horizontal ‘H’ and ‘F’ forms that refers to the artist initials. Most of his works are inmersed in a monochromatic background, creating a delicate lustre where figures and textures give a feeling of frottage where the geometric pattern and the identifiable letter emerge.”
Basics on composition A, 2019
Oil on canvas
40 x 50 cm
Unique piece
The Backround Chronicle II (H), 2013
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 50 cm
Unique piece
His work on paper has a wide variety of graphic techniques such as sketch lines, open or consolidated hatching, a variety of straight or gyrating strokes, grazing or forceful application of the pencil, distinguishing this graphic compositions on paper by its diversity of forms and media. Given that Federle himself characterised these pieces as a kind of memo to himself, it is hardly surprising that the paper he used was of widely varying. In keeping with his comparatively spontaneous practice; he naturally resorted to materials that were at hand.
Überlagerung zur Strukturvernetzung, 1994
Pencil, ballpoint pen on paper
22.8 x 30.4 cm
Unique piece
For the American Indian, 1991
Color pencil on paper
21 x 24.1 cm
Unique piece
Exzentrische Figur (Blume), 1989
Pencil and felt pen on paper
29 x 20 cm
Unique piece
“The original use of geometry or the vocabulary of forms was always coupled with a ritualized content or, to a certain minimun, charged with sentimentality, and it was important to me to come back to this quality.”
Roter Vogel (Schleier) über blauer Form, 1984
Ballpoint pen, colored pencil, pencil on paper
28.7 x 21 cm
Unique piece
Untitled, 1986/2020
Black and white photograph on Baryt
28.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 20 + 5 EA
“The painting actually finds me more than I find the painting it’s just a doing itself, which is typical from calligraphy. You just makes a mark and the mark finds you and telling you that it is ok as it is.”