Lot number 30 - Bob BONIES (1937)

Color serigraph - Bob Bonies (The Hague 1937)

'Untitled,' pencil signature, dated 1981, sheet dimensions approx. 57 x 98 cm, framed, overall dimensions approx. 100 x 60 cm, provenance: private collection, Regensburg, see report by the Kunstmuseum Den Haag on the exhibition February 6, 2021 - September 5, 2021: The artist Bob Bonies (born 1937 in The Hague) has created a body of work spanning six decades. Since the 1960s, he has created 'concrete art,' abstract geometric paintings that have significantly shaped the appearance of abstract art in the Netherlands and still appear contemporary today. The monochrome color fields of his paintings are exactly what they seem to be: color and form. Bonies lived for a time in the USA and Canada in the early 1960s. There he encountered Color Field and Hard-Edge painting: large-format, abstract works with luminous areas of color. He also discovered Minimal Art. After returning to the Netherlands, Europe experienced Minimal Art for the first time in Bonies' hometown of The Hague, at an exhibition organized by the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in 1968. While Bonies may have been influenced by the art he encountered in the United States, he is primarily a European artist. He studied at the Vrije Académie and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, as well as at the Konstfack-Skolan in Stockholm. Even in his early abstract-constructivist works, it was clear that he stood in the tradition of the Russian avant-garde, with painters such as Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, as well as with De Stijl, whose members included Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg—movements that are, not coincidentally, strongly represented in Dutch museum collections. The modernists Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema, who shared similar ideas to De Stijl and both taught at art academies, also exerted a lasting influence on him. Since 1964, Bonies has been creating 'shaped canvases.' He uses the standard canvas shape for paintings—rectangular or square—but ultimately achieves a complex form by joining several canvases together. Through his choice of colors, Bonies achieves optimal contrast, creating areas of solid red, blue, yellow, or green.
[GDFK45E6M0]