Richard Paul Lohse

A Museum Haus Konstruktiv exhibition in cooperation with the Richard Paul Lohse Foundation, MASI Lugano, the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, and the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen am Rhein

Museum Haus Konstruktiv’s programme for the year 2026 begins with a comprehensive solo exhibition on Richard Paul Lohse (1902–1988). This painter and graphic designer from Zurich, who also made a name for himself as a theorist capable of incisive reflection, was one of the key figures in constructivist-concrete art. With his multifaceted oeuvre, he shaped not only the development of modern Swiss graphic design, but also the post-war period’s international avant-garde. From a present-day perspective, it is particularly remarkable that Lohse was already developing his rational and serial visual systems in the 1940s and 1950s, well in advance of the ideas along similar lines that would give rise to major art movements in the 1960s. He also demonstrated a strong commitment to socio-political issues, voicing his conviction that art, among other things, always conveyed social structures.

The current exhibition focuses on Lohse’s output as a painter. With over fifty works realised between 1942 and 1987, we provide insight into his oeuvre, which began with abstract approaches and evolved into a geometric, systematic visual language.

5.2.– 10.5.2026
curated by Sabine Schaschl und Evelyne Bucher

After completing an apprenticeship and working as a commercial artist in the office of well-known advertiser Max Dalang, Richard Paul Lohse successfully set up his own business as a graphic designer and typographer in 1930. Alongside his professional activity, he was interested in painting, and after producing some early figurative and abstract works, he turned to the constructivist-concrete style in the early 1940s. For this, he found important sources of inspiration in the Dutch de stijl movement and in Russian constructivism.

In both of the domains in which he worked, commercial graphics and independent art, he consistently pursued the goal of combining aesthetic form with social responsibility, quite in keeping with his conviction that aesthetics without societal anchoring were inconceivable. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that Lohse was also involved in politics, both generally and in cultural contexts. He initiated and organised numerous exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, was a founding member of Allianz (an association of modern Swiss Artists) and actively supported the anti-fascist movement in Germany, France and Italy. He made appeals to decision-makers in the cultural sector, and publicly advocated both the recognition of constructive-concrete art and the promotion of selected artists.

Marked by a youth full of hardship (after the early death of his father, his family had lived in poverty), Lohse championed social equality throughout his life and consistently translated this into compositional principles, such as quantitative equality among all colours used in a picture, for example. “My works,” as he himself put it in a 1988 documentary about him, “are an attempt to visualise how the structures of the world could be improved.”

In 1943, he started to concentrate on orthogonally structured image fields. This resulted in image-filling systems with an increasingly broadened colour spectrum. For Lohse, they conveyed a modern non-hierarchical society. His rational approach, characterised by structure and logic, opened up a dialogue with the observer via the comprehensibility of the method used in the artwork, thus offering a contemporary concept to counter the cliché of the intuition-driven artist. Lohse explained his theoretical deliberations, findings and postulates in his so-called Entwicklungslinien (Lines of Development), writings that he produced over the course of several decades.

Lohse’s ideas and way of working are particularly evident in the designs, constructional drawings and colour charts that he developed from 1943 onwards. In these, he reveals the rules on which his pictures are based. With the aid of notes, numbers and diagrams, he explains the composition of his paintings, step by step. Many works are based on fixed numerical systems that structure the individual work steps in clear tables. Years later, on the occasion of an exhibition at Kunstverein München, the artist would declare: “My pictures can be transmitted over the phone.”

Those early drawings, a selection of which we present here in display cases, provide the conceptual basis of his oeuvre. However, most of his paintings were not produced until after 1960, due to his extensive professional activity. The time lag between conception and execution is documented in each case by a pair of dates; occasionally, there is also a third figure, indicating the number of variations based on the same mathematical system.

The earliest paintings exhibited here were produced in 1942: Abwandlung einer Figur (Alteration of a Figure), Verwandlung von vier gleichen Figuren (Transformation of Four Equal Figures) and Dynamische Konstruktion (Dynamic Construction). They show curvatures and geometric shapes (predominantly triangles) in red, yellow, blue and black, floating freely in a bright image space, with certain perceptible echoes of Kazimir Malevich’s suprematist works.

In that same year, Lohse abandoned the triangle motif and focused on the vertical. This is exemplified by the two pieces Vertikaler Rhythmus (Vertical Rhythm, 1942) and Konkretion I (Concretion I, 1945/1946), in which fine vertical lines structure the bright background.

Soon afterwards, the vertical linear structures began to be gradually replaced by rectangular and square colour fields, filling the entire picture surface. For these, Lohse made a distinction between what he called ‘modular orders’ and ‘serial orders’.

Works in his Modular Orders series are based on systematic manipulation of a primary module – by means of rotation, multiplication or enlargement, for instance.

His Serial Orders appear far more complex. These works feature chromatic progressions with up to thirty steps, in cyclical or dual-cycle colour sequences, which come across as highly dynamic, due to their staggered arrangement and colour rhythm. In their titles, the artist himself provided clues on how to decipher these systematically constructed images.

Even though its conceptual foundations were laid early on, Richard Paul Lohse’s oeuvre can be seen to have undergone impressive technical and formal development: Over the years, the way in which he applied the paint became more saturated and vivid, and his use of gradations gave rise to an increasingly rich and sophisticated colour scheme.

Together with Max Bill, Camille Graeser and Verena Loewensberg, Lohse was one of the core Zurich Concretists, and he vigorously advocated the recognition of constructivist-concrete art in Switzerland. Most of all though, it was his involvement in international exhibitions that made him more widely known. In 1961, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam became the first museum to honour him with a retrospective. In 1965, he exhibited together with Jean Tinguely in the Swiss pavilion at the 8th São Paulo Biennial. His most significant exhibition activity included taking part in 1968’s documenta 4 in Kassel, representing Switzerland at the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972, and again participating in documenta in 1982.

At the invitation of Rudi Fuchs, who was the director of documenta in 1982, Lohse exhibited, among other pieces, three large-format variations (A, B and C) on Serielles Reihenthema in achtzehn Farben (Serial Row Theme in Eighteen Colours). Considered the pinnacle of his Serial Orders, these are displayed together in the rear hall at Haus Konstruktiv. Almost six metres long, each of these paintings comprises a grid of 108 squares, arranged in six rows that feature 18 different hues. They follow the principle of quantitative colour equality: All colours in the grid are equivalent in terms of quantity and area. This three-part work makes visual perception challenging. It incorporates the space and even the observers, presenting itself as an open and changeable structure as they move around.

Waagrechte Dominante mit violettem Quadrat (Horizontal Dominant with Violet Square, 1950/1977), Diagonalordnung aus heller Gleichung und Kontrast (Diagonal Order from Bright Equation and Contrast, 1956/1975), Kreuz aus Gleichung und Kontrast (Cross from Equation and Contrast, 1955/1976) and Gelb verbunden mit Rot (Yellow Combined with Red, 1956/1985) from the series Neun Quadrate (Nine Squares) are key works from the artist’s late period. They demonstrate a densification of his modular compositional principle. In 1988, as part of his first solo exhibition in the USA, these works represented Lohse at two important venues: firstly at the Chinati Foundation, established in Marfa, Texas, by Donald Judd, a leading representative of minimal art, and secondly in this American artist’s studio-cum-residence at 101 Spring Street in New York.

The exhibition at Haus Konstruktiv clearly shows that the paintings developed by Lohse in the 1940s and 1950s anticipated numerous trends that would later gain art-historical significance. These include colour-field painting, as well as various conceptual and minimalist movements, right through to computer-generated art.

To accompany the exhibition, a catalogue has been published by Hatje Cantz Verlag (in German, English and Italian) with contributions by Tobia Bezzola, Evelyne Bucher, Taisse Grandi Venturi, Sabine Schaschl and Linda Walther.