Helmut Federle (b. 1944, Solothurn, Switzerland) lives and works in Vienna, Austria and Camaiore, Italy. Federle represented Switzerland in 1997 at the XLVII Venice Biennale. Select solo museum exhibitions include: Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2019); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2012); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France (2002); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (1999); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (1999); Galerie national du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (1995); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (1992); and Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (1992). Select museum collections include Tate Modern, London, UK; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switerzerland; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Albertina, Vienna, Austria; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.
 

“Within every tradition there is a strenuous argument between the forces of repetition and the forces of renewal. In painting, this is particularly true of the geometric tradition which originated in the early decades of this century. Federle is one of the few contemporary artists to renew the geometric tradition. He understands that balance and closure are not ends in themselves, and that self-sufficiency and well-ordered design are not necessarily geometry’s destination. This is something both Mondrian and Malevich understood. For them, geometry was the basis of their investigative vocabulary. It was not only a way to discover further evidence of the tensile relationship between order and disorder, and movement and stillness, but also the most focused means with which to articulate the various relationships that could occur between part and whole."

— John Yau, "The Condition of Music," 1993, Basics on Composition, 2020

 

“In short, the strict, spare, seemingly depleted formal presence of Federle’s paintings is rich in meanings. Those meanings await any viewer alert to nuances and irregularities in what may initially appear as typical modernist surfaces, a viewer who, like someone walking through the desert, keeps a sharp eye out for the changes in terrain that indicate ruins under hardpacked sand and clay.”

— Robert Storr, “Scratching Away at the Surface,” Helmut Federle: American Songline, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland, 2012


 

"The visual economy of Federle’s painting has two foundations. On the one hand: clear shapes, well demarcated areas, straightforward structures. On the other: Diffusion, complex transitions, climatic processes. In a mysterious way that is hard to perceive, the one determines the other."

— Gottfried Boehm, "Dark Light," Helmut Federle: XLVII Biennale Venedig, XLVII Venice Biennale, Italy, 1997

 

"A sense of balance pervades Helmut Federle’s work: a masterful push and pull of opposing pictorial means that demands our attention from the outset without ever fully gratifying it."

— David Mistelli, "Helmut Federle: Kunstmuseum Basel," Artforum, October 2019


 

"Behind the superficial similiarity of the Basics on Composition, one senses a mutual differentiation — even a strangeness — between the various parts. The smallest discrepancies become increasingly clear and ultimately split the pictorial unity. The differences reinforce one another, while at the same time growing together inseparably."

"The subtitles and dedications Federle provides for many works in Basics on Composition are also of little use. I would even go so far as to say that they are so wonderful and touching because they do not contribute to our understanding. They explain nothing. For the most part, they evoke multilayered memories. They inspire intense perception and enrich our experience of these pictures, but they do not offer a key."

— Erich Franz, "Helmut Federle: Basics on Composition," Basics on Composition, 2020

 

“I still regard composition as an essential element of painting because the picture in its environment consists of this dialogue, this balance of forces between the picture and the space, between the paint mass and the object quality of the base material. [...] The same applies to the question of content: to my mind, there is no such thing as absolute non-referential painting. There is no painting that does not arouse some climatic associations with something else.”

— Helmut Federle

 

"After painting for 50 years with a palette limited mostly to black, gray, white and yellow, and representing Switzerland at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Mr. Federle has said that he nearly stopped painting in 2005. More recently, he has stressed that painting for him is spiritual: He has called the art world a 'world of religion without the church.'"

— Martha Schwendener, "Helmut Federle: The Ferner Paintings," The New York Times, January 3, 2014




 

"I've known and admired the paintings of Helmut Federle for twenty five years but did not know that he is one of the few collectors of Japanese chawan, teabowls, in the West. Chawan are complex objects made for one of the most elaborately choreographed ceremonies in the world where aesthetics, literature, objects, architecture and social relationships are brought together for the Japanese Tea Ceremony."

— Edmund de Waal, "I read and walk around," 2009, Abstract Matter [Paintings and Ceramics], Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017

 

“Federle ‘finds’ his proportions in the interplay of feeling and intellect, yet the starting point is always the feeling, never the cool calculation. The rational does have its place within his creative processes, but - as he emphasizes in his notes - it may never predominate and obstruct the view onto ‘the whole.’”

— Eva Badura-Triska, "1/1, 1/2, 1/4 (To Johannes Itten)," Helmut Federle: 5 + 1, 1990


 

"In 1969, Helmut Federle travelled from Europe to Kathmandu in Nepal with friends in a Volkswagen bus. Fifty years of travelling and forming a language and position in abstract painting is an effort. It has always been evident in his work that this interest in other cultures and the richness of man-made aesthetics, often with sparse materials, is shared throughout history."

— Erik Steffensen, "Three Owls," Basics on Composition, 2020


 

“The drawings were never meant to be sketches for paintings, they were pieces by themselves. Defined pieces means they were not just studies…I don’t see myself as a painter or the guy who is doing drawings. I see myself as somebody who is expressing his inner experiences and his inner need in different media.”

— Helmut Federle


 

“At first glance, Federle's geometry seems straightforward, a simple matrix of verticals and horizontals, with an implicit clarity. The geometry seems to do nothing but state and differentiate a surface. But then, on closer, more careful looking, a certain quirkiness and oddness becomes evident. There is a sense of something amiss or disturbed in the geometry, evocative of a sense of depth. It is ingeniously sublime.”

— Donald Kuspit, "Ascent to the Right," Helmut Federle: 5 + 1, 1990


 

About the Photograph:

During one of Helmut Federle's several stays in the USA, this photograph of a horse was made in 1986 on the Navajo Nation Reservation in Arizona, which he had already visited in the early 1970s. Federle is interested in all of American culture, which he approaches in this work with his own distinctive symbolism, spirituality, and closeness to nature. The photograph explores the same type of content found in a photographic series in 1998 whose depictions of animals refer to different geographical places and times.