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Max Bill

Biography:

Max Bill, born in 1908 in Winterthur, Switzerland, completed an apprenticeship as a silversmith at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich and studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau under Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and others. In 1929, he returned to Zurich where he worked as an architect, painter, graphic designer and sculpture and later as a product designer. From 1932 to 1936, Max Bill was a member of the Paris artists’ group “Abstraction-Création” and developed friendly contacts with Hans Arp, Piet Mondrian and Auguste Herbin. In 1936, he formulated the “Principles of Concrete Art”. In 1937, he worked on a monograph of Le Corbusier and joined the “Allianz”, the association of modern Swiss artists. In 1944, Bill founded the magazine “abstrakt konkret”, organized an exhibition under the same name at Kunsthalle Basel and obtained a post to teach formal structures at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. As the spiritual creator and architect of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and then, from 1952, as the rector and head of the architecture and product design departments, Bill attempted to continue the tradition of the Bauhaus in Dessau. From 1967 to 1974, he held a professorship in environmental design at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. A number of monumental sculptures are created during the 1980s. Amidst all these areas of activity, the name Max Bill is primarily associated with concrete art and environmental design. In addition, as a student of the Bauhaus and contributor of theoretical publications, Bill became one of the most important stimulators of modern-concrete art in post-war Europe. He died in 1994 in Berlin.