MAX BILL

(1908-1994)

Unendliche Fläche in Form einer Säule (Endless surface in form of a column)
1953

Footnotes

This work is registered in the max, binia + jakob bill stiftung, Adligenswil, and will be accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity.

Provenance
Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 1990



Coming fresh to the market after remaining in the same private collection for over two decades, Unendliche Fläche in Form einer Säule (Endless surface in form of a column) is a truly magnificent and elegant work by one of the 20th centuries most influential artists. Shimmering in warm golden hues, the slender column beautifully demonstrates Max Bill's fastidiously technical and enduring vision of art that made him such a broadly influential artist of the Modern age. Audaciously pure and deceptively simple, the present work is a sterling example of Bill's mathematical approach to artmaking; a supremely elegant sculpture that formalises the concept of infinity in the eloquent and harmonious medium of gilded brass. Bill designed the first version of this sculpture in 1953 and produced others of varying sizes over the next decades.

With works held in major museum collections that include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Centre Pompidou in Paris – as well as his public artworks, such as the Pavillon-Skulptur in Zurich, that have become landmarks in their own right – Bill, who was an autodidact and polymath, has recently seen a significant reassessment that coincided with the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Bauhaus school in Weimar in 1919.

A testament to the artist's perfectionism and attention to detail, the present sculpture twists exactly 90 degrees between its base and top, the actual surface area melting into one in a mind-bending feat of manufacturing a multi-dimensional form. There is only one surface area that can be followed endlessly. Captivated by the Möbius strip – a surface of one continuous side formed by joining the ends of a rectangle twisted through 180° - and the mathematical notion of infinity, Bill's sculptures consistently play host to the abstract wonders of mathematics and geometry, which, when realised in the material, emerge as objects of beautiful, transcendent simplicity.

Bill would often revisit his designs and ideas, creating multiple versions of the same concept and only beginning the process of executing his vision once the technicalities of the form had been perfectly resolved to their purest form. "A work of art," Bill wrote, "must be entirely conceived and shaped by the mind before its execution. It shall not receive anything of nature's or sensuality's or sentimentality's formal data" (the artist in: Edwin Heathcote, 'Max Bill — the cult figure who shaped 20th-century design and architecture', Financial Times, June 7, 2019, online).

As an architect, sculptor, designer, painter and teacher, Bill embodied the aspirations of the Bauhaus movement, who collectively sought to synthesise the arts, including graphic design, interiors and typography, into one total work of art. Born in Zürich in 1908, Bill trained as a silversmith before a decisive encounter at the age of 16 with Sophie Taeuber-Arp launched his interest in contemporary art practice. Whilst Bill would go on to be invited to exhibit alongside Hans and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Piet Mondrian and Georges Vantongerloo as part of the Abstraction-Creation group throughout his mid-twenties, it was his studies at the Bauhaus school in Dessau in 1927, under the pupillage of Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy – in the midst of an unparalleled generation of influential Modernist creatives that he would befriend and work alongside throughout his career – that Bill truly began to emerge as the multifaceted and superbly gifted artist and designer he is recognised as today.

As an artist whose influence has been felt across genres, Max Bill's Unendliche Fläche in Form einer Säule (Endless surface in form of a column) is an immaculate demonstration of the artist at his most purely creative and uncompromising. Featuring the smooth metallic lines and curves that call to mind the aerodynamics of an aircraft's fuselage, the wonderful synthesis of science, mathematics and art in the present work is tangible and thrilling. A timeless piece that has never been offered at auction or placed on public view; it is a sculptural work that encapsulates and defines the legacy of one of the most important students of the Bauhaus.