untitled 1962

Hans Bichoffshausen's work only reveals its significance in an international context. Its roots reach back to the methodology and theory of the artists' group Abstraction-Création in Paris in the 1930s where artists such as Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo, Kurt Schwitters and Auguste Herbin laid the foundations for non-objective art. Their achievements gave rise to movements such as Nouveau Réalisme and Arte Povera. The relationship with Lucio Fontana's "Concetto spaziale", in which painting and sculpture are seen as freely unfolding, unlimited continuums, should also not be underestimated. As early as 1956, the artist described Fontana as his most important kindred spirit, was friends with him, and exhibited together with him. Like the latter, Bischoffshausen perforates and structures the mostly monochrome pictorial surfaces in order to achieve plasticity, break through two-dimensionality, and achieve a "synthesis of color, sound, movement, time, and space."

In 1961 and 1962, several large-format canvas paintings (Cat. No. 15) were created, some of them titled "Champs de l'Energie", energy fields, in which Hans Bischoffshausen explores possible structures in white on white. This theme continues to figure prominently in his work well into the 1960s. Small distortions, like sand dunes or waves, sometimes barely perceptible, move across the picture from bottom to top. In some places they condense into groups, in others the white ground remains smooth and calm. The energy that Bischoffshausen captures with these images is clearly perceptible in the composition, movement, time and space merge into a unity and the monochrome becomes a "manifestation of light" .