October 2001
Geometrical Affairs
New acquisitions and works from the collection
Sylvie Fleury
John Armleder Josef Albers
Gottfried HoneggerCamille Graeser
Gail Haistings
Karin Sander
Gottfried Honegger
Gottfried Honegger
b.1917 Zurich/CHTableau-Relief P.885, 1983
Acrylic and oil on canvas, 2 parts, 200 x 115 cmGottfried Honegger developed the Tableau-Relief as a pictorial type in about 1950, and refined from then until the 90s. His earlier works have a gentle, membrane-like texture, but later the surfaces are enhanced by three-dimensional relief, which means that they can change greatly according to the incident light. None of the individual pictures, which are painted on cardboard squares and worked on with a graphite pencil and glue or raised into three dimensions by the application of a large number of layers of paint, is identical with any of the others or on the same plane as them.
Colour appears here in muted monochrome as material that can be shaped. Honegger is aiming at an interplay between reason and feeling, programme and openness, and ultimately between the principle of order and its poetic complement, a state of free play.