(born in Solothurn in 1944; lives and works in Vienna and Camaiore)
Null Bild Serie, 2. Phase, Tafel A, 1993, on the reverse titled, signed, dated Federle 93, acrylic on aluminum, 70 x 100 cm

Provenance:
Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna
Private collection, Austria
Private collection, France

Exhibited/Literature:
Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna, 1993
Kunstmuseum Bonn, 12 October 1995 – 21 January 1996, Düsseldorf 1995, p. 82/83, exhib. cat. with color illustration on p. 83

The Swiss artist Helmut Federle currently lives and works in Vienna. At the end of the 1950s, he began to create geometric-abstract works based on a minimalist, reduced surface design. A decade later, his work is definitively characterised by a strictly geometric formal language. His works show geometric forms and their position and balance in the pictorial plane. The artist himself does not see his work as belonging to any category, but above all as a spiritual search for meaning.

In the aluminium work of the ‘Null Bild’ Series, 2nd Phase, Panel A from 1993, the artist harks back to his paintings of the late 1970s, not least through its dimensions. Federle anchors "upright or transverse rectangular anthracite-coloured fields to the opposite corners of the picture, with a dark grey surface acting as a foil." (Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, 12 October 1995 - 21 January 1996, Düsseldorf 1995, p. 82). Panel A shows a reclining, resting light grey surface in the lower right corner of the picture against a charcoal grey, darker background.

"In the Null-Bild works, the preoccupation with the Black Series is resonant, with the difference that processual events are once again concentrated on the individual image." (Ibid.)