Manitou, 1957

Painting in oil on canvas

Dimensions: 112 x 112 cm

Gottfried Honegger's main work as a painter began in the 1950s with organic abstractions, which he increasingly geometrised around 1957. Under the title "Tableau-Relief" he created what is still his central painterly cycle of mostly monochrome, rarely multi-coloured, often multi-part pictorial objects. Until around 1980 Honegger preferred the collage technique. In the 1980s, Honegger was preoccupied with the field of tension between a regular compositional grid and so-called residual space. In the 1990s he changed the pictorial language once again, but retained the theme of circular and square forms.

Gottfried Honegger was born in Zurich in 1917 and initially worked as a commercial artist before deciding to become a freelance artist in 1958 during a stay in New York. In 1990 he co-founded the Espace de l'Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux, southern France, together with Sybil Albers. In 2004, the Albers-Honegger Collection in Mouans-Sartoux, which is open to the public, was donated to the French state. Honegger was awarded the Zurich Art Prize and the Ordre des Arts des Lettres, among others.