Rudolf De Crignis (1948)
Switzerland

"After an apprenticeship as a window dresser, he attended the F+F School for Experimental Design in Zurich from 1973 to 1974. From 1975 freelance artist in Zurich. Scholarships from the Canton of Zurich (1976, 1977, 1979) and the City of Zurich (1976, 1979, 1981). Federal art scholarship in 1976 and 1978. 1976 group exhibition at the Biennale di Venice. In 1985 he received a studio scholarship from the city of Zurich for New York, where he had his permanent residence from 1987 until his death in 2006. 1989 sponsorship award from the Camille Graeser Foundation Zurich. From 2000 onwards various gallery exhibitions in the USA and Europe. 2013 solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Rudolf de Crignis stood out in the Zurich art scene in the mid-1970s with conceptual and at the same time playful works in the areas of sculpture, photography and installation. At the end of the decade he decided to take up painting; Images emerge that can be attributed to the then current preoccupation with figuration - Arte Povera, individual mythologies. For a while he also integrated found objects into his paintings.

During his studio stay in New York in 1985, de Crignis turned to non-representational painting and dealt intensively with American color field painting, minimal art, radical painting and so-called Neo Geo. The first pictures painted in New York show abstract shapes in a free geometric arrangement, which show a certain proximity to the art of Helmut Federle. A little later he arranges the colored areas into strictly constructed images, sculpture models and reliefs. Favorite formal elements are stripes, ribbons and the diptych.

Parallel to the formal reduction of his paintings is the color, and he now develops and varies his paintings intuitively in series. Starting with works with cloudy application of paint, in 1992 he arrived at monochrome with the cycle Black over Color, which he saw less as a rational and radical solution in the sense of concrete art, but - similar to the American painter Brice Marden - as a meditative act and exploration of expressive art Possibilities of abstract painting.

Rudolf de Crigni's monochrome paintings are created in an extremely slow painting process. They are made up of several different colored layers, with the artist choosing a basic color - for example black, gray or ultramarine. Painting is done with extra-wide painting tools, which consist of several fine brushes held by screw clamps.

The paint - mixed according to ancient knowledge from pigments, beeswax and turpentine - is applied to the canvas in a strong glaze, alternating in horizontal and vertical directions until it is evenly distributed over the surface; Only after one layer has completely dried is another layer placed on top. In the summer of 2005, Rudolf von Crignis documented the creation of the painting Painting no. 05-30 over a period of 36 days in a photographic image log.

For the format of the painting, de Crignis takes measurements from the human body: the larger, mostly square picture formats are determined by the span of the arms, the format of the smaller ones is based on the swing of the arms above the ground.

The theme of space is also an integral part of the precise installation arrangement of the pictures, for example in the exhibition 5 paintings at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2003: The paintings created specifically for this room are all in ultramarine blue, yet each has an individual color scheme. Because they are hung low, they become a direct physical counterpart and change depending on the perspective, incidence of light and distance.

The work of Rudolf de Crignis is received in the context of radical painting, especially its American variants. The solo exhibition at the House for Constructive and Concrete Art in 1991 already provided this reading and it continued until the posthumous exhibition with works from 1991 to 2006 at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2013, where his monochrome paintings were shown in the context of the abstract minimal art of Ad Reinhardt, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin are situated."
(Source, website, SIK)

Work :

• Vivi-Kola (F+F Schule) (1974)