WILLI GOETZ

Provenance:
- From the artist's estate.
- Private collection Switzerland.

Exhibition: Zurich 2020, Willi Goetz. Ein Schweizer Konkreter. Galerie Meridian, May - June (with colour ill.).

“Willi Goetz's ever new, ever varied attempts to create clear situations on the canvas apply to form as well as to colour (...) It is a strictly logical painting that Willi Goetz pursues, an unambiguous one, free of any philosophy. It simply seeks to provide examples, not to convey messages and programmes; it is therefore one of the most honest and extraordinary things that geometric-constructive painting has to offer today”– Dr. K. Stüber

Willi Goetz, whose original training was in commerce, came to painting in a roundabout way: his encounter with the Zurich painter Oskar Dalvit was fundamental to Goetz's later decision to give up his professional work and devote himself to painting. After a few years of private lessons with Dalvit and attending evening classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule and Freie Kunstschule in Zurich, he began working as a freelance artist in 1951. With exhibitions at the Galerie Palette, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and biennials in Ancona and Lausanne, Goetz made a name for himself in the Swiss art scene. As co-founder of the Zurich artists' collective Gruppe X, Goetz continued to devote himself to geometric elementary forms and ordered structures. The austerity of the "Zurich Concrete Artists" remains tangible in Goetz's work: a picture or sculpture should be no more than what they are: structures of form and colour.