Richard Paul Lohse
‘The attitudes implicit in Lohse's work, including strong and still radical ideas about society, are very interesting, both as to what is older and what newer. The squares and rectangles comprise schemes that repeat or vary with colours that correspondingly repeat or vary. This way of working which now is common to lots of us, didn't exist before Lohse and some others. It's not the way that Mondrian, Malevich, or Van Doesburg worked. In Lohse's work there is the end of the European compositional tradition, a good end, and also there is the beginning of much that is still beginning to develop.’ - Donald Judd, 1988
Richard Paul Lohse was a Swiss painter and graphic artist and one of the main representatives of the concrete and constructive art movements. In 1918 he joins the advertising agency Max Dalang where he trains to be an advertising artist. Lohse, the autodidact, paints expressive, late cubist still lifes. In the 1930s his work as a graphic artist and book designer puts him among the pioneers of modern Swiss graphic design; in his painting he works on curved and diagonal constructions.
1943 marks a breakthrough in Lohse's painting: he standardises the pictorial means and starts to develop modular and serial systems. In 1953 he publishes the book "New Design in Exhibitions", and from 1958 he is coeditor of the magazine Neue Grafik/New Graphic Design. Important exhibitions and publications bring Lohse's systematic-constructive art and constructive graphic design worldwide acclaim. He died in Zürich in 1988.
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1. Richard Paul Lohse, Untitled, 1981, Tate
2. Richard Paul Lohse, Sechs systematische Farbreihen von gelb zu gelb, 1955/65, Christie’s Auction
3. Richard Paul Lohse, Bewegung von 4 kontrastierenden Gruppen aus einem Zentrum, 1952/62, Christie’s Auction
4. Richard Paul Lohse, Progression von Winkelgruppen, 1968, Christie’s Auction