Detail

Hans Bischoffshausen, from Carinthia in Austria, painted radically reductive works that he said took ascetic white right to the limits. He was one of only few Austrian representatives of the ZERO movement. He began by painting gestural abstract works, and then embarked on a new style when he moved to Paris in the late 1950s. From then on, he focused on the surface structures of monochrome painting. His white “energy fields,” as he himself called them, tested the limits of the visible. “My ideal is no longer a picture that can be photographed,” he said. The surface of the material painting here, made of five parts with PVC on plywood, gains its rhythm from various indentations. This creates contours that physically expand the picture and blur the distinction between a flat picture and a spatial sculptural work. Varying light conditions and the position of the viewer make it possible to see this Energy Field in many different ways, alternating between light and shade, emptiness and volume, sensual presence and abstract idea. This is an interplay that is continually shifting and the painting is experienced as a never-ending process.