"White per se is an extremely complex colour. The main reason I use white, is because I want to create a most precise spatial positioning of the art work. I exploit all possibilities and forego nothing."

Andreas Christen (1936-2006) is among the most renowned Swiss artists and at the same time is one of the most important representatives of the Swiss product design. Haus Konstruktiv shows his first broad retrospective with not only a comprehensive presentation of the artistic œuvre from the early 1960s to his last series of works from 2004/2005, but also showing some of his most important design products. This overview of Christen's overall artistic development clearly reveals how he worked in both fields, art and design, with the same artistic-aesthetic attitude. During the exhibition, a publication will be released by the publisher Kehrer Verlag.

Andreas Christen: The Artist
In this solo exhibition, we show early paintings from the end of the 1950s, when Christen was still using a traditional geometric painting style with elementary colours, before he found to his highly idiosyncratic monochrome solutions.

His relief images, which from 1959 onwards became known as "Monoforms", have an object-like character – a result of a intense reflection on the medium of painting, in which Christen intervened by breaking the picture surface. This involves an aspect central to concrete art, namely the handling of the surface; its possible spatial extension is explored.

While classical panel painting employed perspective to create an illusion of spatial depth on the image surface, classical modernist painters saw it as their task to leave the surface as a surface. The beginnings of this development were already established in the paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). The strictly surface-bound images by concrete artists like Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) or Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) represent what at that time was the most radical implementation of this development. These artists were all concerned with freeing painting's media, i.e. surface, colour and form, from their representative function.

Looking at the works of Andreas Christen, we can discover a fascinating ambivalence: they are pictorial without using any colour, and they are object-like, although they remain attached to the plane. Individual points are brought out of the image surface in relief, and where the light diffracts on the edges and angles of the image surface, a multifaceted play of light occurs. "I leave colour as a body to the others," said Christen in an interview in 1993, "but not colour as light." And thus, solely by means of the incident light on his relief images, subtle nuances develop, from brilliant white to deep dark grey. The observer may be reminded of the white images by the US-American painter Robert Rauschenberg, which John Cage once described as landing strips for light.

Andreas Christen: The Designer
Andreas Christen was represented in numerous exhibitions all around the world, and yet even today remains an insider's tip. Thus, alongside Christen's subtle artworks, which can be described as between concretion and minimalism, some of his most important design objects can also be seen in his solo exhibition. Under the title "Lifeworlds", we show objects such as Christen's stackable polyester bed, his shelf system (which has long since become a classic), his lamp, and his mailbox. In the 1970s, Andreas Christen, together with company director Ernst Schweizer, designed a mailbox which irrevocably changed the appearance of Swiss streets and residences. Christen himself mentioned it in 1994, in the magazine “Hochparterre”: "Probably the best thing I have made was a standard mailbox for the company Schweizer in the seventies which is still on the market today."

The stackable bed is also available again: the company Scobalit AG, based in Winterthur, is reissuing an edition of 15 plastic stackable beds based on the original 1960 design, and these can be purchased in Haus Konstruktiv during the exhibition.

But also the collaboration between Andreas Christen and Lehni AG is a special kind of success story. From the mid-1960s onwards, most of the designs for the Lehni AG collection were produced by Christen. In an unparalleled manner, a trend-setting and engaging collaboration had developed between a company and an artist. On their website, the company makes a clear statement about Christen's designs: "Thanks to its clear language of forms, its diversity, and its adaptability, our aluminium furniture endures the changing course of time, and times of change."

We will exhibit a selection of Christen's most important design objects along with his works, such as the "Monoforms". In addition, we document the extraordinary artistic language of Andreas Christen's "double existence" as artist and as designer, with texts, sketches and photographs.

Parallel to Christen's exhibition, we once again continue our successful "Visionary Collection" series: in a dialogue with works and objects by Andreas Christen, the "Visionary Collection Vol. 7 - Beauty, not always perfect" will address issues regarding the instruments of harmony. Beginning with the work "perfect square" by Carsten Nicolai, which we were able to add to our collection only recently, the exhibited works offer responses to Christen's artistic themes.