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HANS HINTERREITER (Switzerland, Winterthur 1902-1989 / act: Spain) |
Hans Hinterreiter was born on 28 January 1902 in Winterthur, Switzerland. He became one of the most consistent exponents of Constructive Art, while being one of the artists – together with Max Bill (1908-1994), Camille Graeser (1892-1980), and Richard P. Lohse (1902-1988) - who founded Concrete Art. For over half a century he created art with admirable perseverance, following through what he began in 1930. During the course of his achievement he evolved an inimitable pictorial language based on mathematics, geometry and color theory. While being astonishingly bold with artistic creation, he gave his work such structural order as to enable a systymatic perception and access of it. He died on 15 Spetember 1989 at home in his beloved Ibiza, Spain. [Megakles Rogakos 14/10/2005]Hans Hinterreiter's non-linear transformations. Hans Hinterreiter was a Swiss painter, belonging to the Constructivist movement, who spent most of his life in Ibiza, Spain. Since 1930 he occupied himself with the laws of form and colour. Parallel to Escher, he discovered laws of coloured symmetry before crystallographers started working on them (more about it in Makovicky, Emil Z. Kristallogr 1979, 150, 13). After a period of experimentation with plane groups of symmetry, he moved to a more complex level of geometric abstract art by applying non-linear transformations to the plane-group patterns. His goal was to achieve a more dynamic rendition of the patterns used. My poster illustrates four different cases of this process, starting always with a plane-group pattern and showing both the application of non-linear transformations and coloured symmetry. § In his more complex patterns, two of which are shown on the poster, Hinterreiter created domains of affinely or perspectively distorted motif which were further combined by means of domain boundaries or by the operations of twinning, the latter being frowned upon very much by art specialists when mentioned as one of the analytical concepts. Another means of generalization used by Hinterreiter was a careful mapping of plane-group patterns onto curvilinear nets of different kinds, mostly combined with a skilful application of principles of dichroic or polychromatic symmetry. Unlike Escher, Hinterreiter strove to achieve the aesthetic ideal of a pure abstract form with its inherent symmetries. His unique, two-step approach that combines plane group patterns with the principles of coloured symmetry and nonlinear transformations, his understanding of crystallographic and non-crystallographic symmetry and a meticulous application of these principles even to the most complex patterns produced a legacy close to the heart and mind of every true crystallographer. [Emil Makovicky, University of Copenhagen, Denmark]
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
HANS JOACHIM ALBRECHT & RUDOLF KOELLA Hans Hinterreiter, a Swiss Exponent of Constructive Art 1982 Wasser Verlag, Zurich
