Max Bill Born in 1908 in Winterthour (Switzerland). Died in 1995 in Berlin (Germany).

Max Bill demonstrated very early on a great interest for all areas of design. At eighteen years old, he enrolled in the Zurich school of applied art and chose to specialise in metal. After three years of training, he left for Dessau to take lessons in Bauhaus architecture. Through works from painters such as Klee, Kandinsky, Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy, he produced his first abstract paintings. Returning to Zurich in 1929, Bill started by working as an advertising consultant for architects before starting up his own advertising studio, where he devised things such as letterhead paper and leaflets…

At the same time, he connected with the French arts community. A first impact came in 1931 from reading the single-issue French magazine ‘Art Concret’; Bill would bear its principles in mind when he would come to write his manifesto in 1936. He also met Arp and Mondrian in 1932, and became a member of the French association of abstract artists ‘Abstraction-Création’. His first sculptures, influenced by Russian constructivism (Gabo, Pevsner and Tatline), were created at that time.
In 1935, Bill produced a collection of lithographs, “Fifteen variations on a single theme”, accompanied by commentary on their origin. In its introductory text, the artist explains the necessity to become aware of “those methods which give rise to the work of art”. The following year he pursued his explanatory work and did so by formulating a definition for the first time within the catalogue of Zurich’s ‘Time problems in Swiss painting and sculptures at Kunsthaus’ exhibition: “We call concrete art these works of art which are derived from their basic forms and which follow their own laws, without outside reference to the natural appearance, thus doing without ‘abstractionism’”.
People would have to wait until 1944 to see the first exhibition exclusively devoted to konkrete kunst (concrete art), organised by Bill and the manager of the Kunsthalle art gallery in Basel.
Far from stopping at that, Bill wouldn’t stop until he saw concrete art being at the forefront of the scene, and he would play a very important role for the group in this regard; an inspiration and unifying force to new talent (such as Verena Loewensberg from 1936 onwards or Andreas Christen at the end of the 1950s), he circulated the group’s art within exhibitions, publications and defended its strong principles within the texts that he published.