Background
Rudolf de Crignis was born in 1948 in Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland.
Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany
Rudolf de Crignis was born in 1948 in Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland.
Rudolf de Crignis studied at the Form und Farbe School for Art and Media Design in Zürich in 1973 - 1975, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany.
Rudolf began his artistic career as a performance and video artist, and as such exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1976 in a group exhibition in the Swiss Pavilion called “The Environment.” But his interests began to shift to painting during a visit to New York in the late 1970s or early ’80s when he saw “To the People of New York”, a series of Minimalist abstract paintings by the German painter Blinky Palermo in the collection of the Dia Center for the Arts.
Mr. de Crignis began making seemingly monochrome paintings, often in radiant blues or subtle grays. Built up from numerous thin layers of different colors, they had a luminous depth that was compared more than once to the light installations of James Turrell. Writing in The New York Times in 2004, Ken Johnson called Mr. de Crignis’s work “at once formally severe and materially luxurious” and noted its ability to “bridge the gap between the perceptual and the transcendental.”
Rudolf de Crignis had his first solo show of paintings at Galerie Palette in Zurich in 1980 and his first New York show at the Pamela Auchincloss Gallery in 1995. He had subsequent exhibitions at the Stark Gallery in 1997 and the Peter Blum Gallery in 2001 and 2004. Typical of his method, the paintings included there weighed disciplined procedure and its literal end results against pure retinal viewing experience — immaterial and transcendental.
Often square (roughly 30 by 30 inches or 6 by 60 inches), each piece at first appeared all blue or all gray with deeply color-saturated surfaces. But, in fact, these were the results of the artist layering thin oil washes in accumulation. The gray paintings were made without ever using the color gray. The blue paintings, predominantly ultramarine, were “tinted” with secondary hues, red or silver, for example, creating an illusory experience of color “aura.” Not surprisingly, comparisons to James Turrell light installations often came up in critical descriptions.
Rudolf de Crignis died in 2006 in Manhattan. He was only 58. The cause was an inoperable brain tumor, diagnosed in November. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.
Painting #92131
Painting 98-19
Painting #03-06
Painting No. 97—23 (Ultramarine Blue, Zinc White, Ruby Lake)
Painting #92138
Untitled
Painting #02-26
Painting #92137
Color sample for painting (#03'19)
Painting #92091
Painting #05-03
Painting #93003
Painting #94048
Painting #91121
Painting #93065
Color sample for painting (#01'10)
Painting #91019
Painting #06-13
Painting No. 02–25 (Cobalt Violet, Lemon Yellow, Cobalt Green Dark) (detail)
Painting #95032
Color sample for painting (#03'04)
Color sample for painting (#02'27)
Painting #99-35
Painting #93040
Rudolf de Crignis adhered to the artistic traditions of Minimalism and Neo-Minimalism (Neo-Geo). He abandoned his long-standing interest in the organic or figurative qualities of his subjects in favor of a reduced, geometric style. In his own self-definition, he preferred to state not what he was, but what he was not: not a “Swiss artist”, not a “monochrome painter”, etc.
Rudolf de Crignis was the member of Radical Painting Group.
For all the self-imposed severity displayed in his work, Rudolf was a free thinker, generous in his opinions on other artists and their work. It was a pleasure to go with him to an exhibition because he would always come up with an unorthodox, counter-intuitive response to it. He made many friends in the art community, who valued him for his humor and keen good sense. He was also homosexual.
Rudolf de Crignis had an early marriage that ended in divorce. Then he spent his life with the partner Michael Paoletta.