This painting shares its lozenge shape and geometric division of color with many paintings by Piet Mondrian, whose work Bill collected and in whom he was greatly interested. Bill trained at the Bauhaus in the 1920s under Josef Albers and was an architect and graphic designer as well as an artist. In his work he aimed to transcend personal artistic expression to achieve universal communication, and to this end he used mathematics as a neutralizing compositional device. The subject of an exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in 1950 and winner of the grand prize for sculpture at the São Paulo Bienal in 1951, he helped to introduce a generation of Latin American artists to European geometric abstraction. He designed the catalogue for a 1955 Mondrian exhibition at the Zurich Kunsthaus, and lent to it three Mondrian paintings from his collection.
2010.
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