Background
Gottfried Honegger was born on June 12, 1917, in Zurich, Switzerland.
artist educator graphic designer
Gottfried Honegger was born on June 12, 1917, in Zurich, Switzerland.
Gottfried studied shop-window display at the Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule.
Gottfried taught at the Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule from 1948. In 1950, he became an Abstract artist, influenced by Zurich's concrete art (Bill, Lohse, Graeser) and American painting (Rothko, Newman), Gottfried Honegger found validation of his work during his stay in New York (1958- 1960), where the gallery Martha Jackson organized the first exhibition of his works in 1960. He settled in Paris afterwards, where he made some researches on painting and sculpture. Honegger also spent time in Dallas, Texas as the artist in residence at the University of Dallas.
Gottfried's paintings are arrangements back up by a system, using relief and monochrome, but the structure and the skin of the work remains particularly worked. The simple geometric forms that he used (squares, circles) were arranged inside a regular orthogonal frame according to a pre-established program and always based on calculations. His paintings were made of cardboard pieces posed sharp edged and marouflaged over a canvas, then covered with many layers of paint.
The artist got a relief effect on the surface that caught light and made the composition changeable. The hollow or relief shapes were sometimes created by incisions, which he called "Bevellings". Honegger liked involving chance in the programming of his works and used the computer or just a dice game for that. In sculpture, which he practiced as well since 1968, it prevailed the study of volumes, consisting of cubes, spheres and their multiples, as well as the establishment of structures and patterns based on systems. Honegger died at his home in Zürich, Switzerland from a short-illness on January 17, 2016, aged 98.
He became a member of the Légion d’honneur in 1999.
Quotes from others about the person
According to Blistène Bernard of the Centre Pompidou, Honegger was “part of the great debate about the ideas of abstract art of the twentieth and twenty-first century.”
Gottfried was married to the Swiss illustrator Warja Lavater.