RICHARD PAUL LOHSE

Provenance: Private collection Northern Germany.

“Only open secrets are effective.” (Richard Paul Lohse)

An intensive examination of the Russian Constructivists and the Dutch De Stijl-movement, as well as a detailed analysis of the artistic statements and approaches of individual artists, including primarily Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky and Vladmir Tatlin, as well as Piet Mondriaan and Theo von Doesburg, led the Swiss artist Richard Paul Lohse to his own artistic solution in Abstract Constructive Art. “Lohse has taken the ideas of early Russian Constructivism and the De Stijl-movement and developed them further. He has enriched art with new concepts which he is the first to use: around principles of variability, standardisation, objectivity, anonymisation, flexibility of organisational principles, continuity of structures, congruence of action, identity of form and colour, human equality, growing colour orders, extensibility, dialectical pictorial phrasing.“ (quote John Matheson, in: Exh. Cat. Richard Paul Lohse. Modulare und serielle Ordnungen, Kunsthaus Zürich 19 August – 26 September 1976, p. 12).

Lohse’s works harbour no secrets or surprises. His oeuvre is divided into what are known as the serial and modular orders. The former are based on continuous rows and an equally continuous sequence of colours, which create movement through their combinations. The systems offer the artist unlimited possibilities and thus eliminate the pictorial boundary. The latter, on the other hand, have a fixed centre, from which all further movement develops, so that there is decidedly a pictorial boundary. Since 1943 he worked exclusively with square and rectangles, which create a network of coordinates, with which the artist can work freely. At the same time, he banishes nature, symbolism and dynamics from this language of forms. The colours used are selected systematically from within a colour spectrum, so that the colours are deprived of any kind of symbolism or expressiveness. He dispenses with perspective and the effect of depth, and thereby creates explicitly two-dimensional paintings. Colour and form stand alongside one another in neither compositional nor symbolic relationship but are perfectly equal in value. Naturally his pictorial compositions are governed by a strict plan, sometimes stricter than those of his colleagues, but this plan is immediately clear to the viewer, if they read the title properly.

The painting offered at auction “Zweimal zwei gleiche Farbryhthmen mit 4 weissen Feldern” belongs to Lohse’s modular orders. The centre is composed of four squares of equal size in blue, yellow, red and green, from which two equal colour rhythms composed of 4 squares emerge – the colour rhythms are yellow-green-blue-red and green-red-yellow-blue. The rows are supplemented by the surrounding white – also four fields of identical size. Harald Szeemann divides the reading of a painting by Lohse into three phases: “the eye is first drawn by the richness of the colour forms; then follows the laying bare of the principles of design, the preconditions for the emergence of the picture and finally the restoration of the visual unity, now in the knowledge of the pictorial mechanism.” (quote. Ibid, p. 9).

Richard Paul Lohse is, along with Max Bill, one of the most important and influential artists of his time in Switzerland. Hardly any other artist has undertaken such an independent and consistent path in the examination of history, while never forgetting his social responsibility.