max bill – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

The Artwork of Hans Erni

Born at the city of Lucerne in February of 1909, Hans Erni was a Swiss engraver, graphic designer, illustrator, painter and sculptor. He is best known for his Swiss postage stamp illustrations, lithographs for the Swiss Red Cross, and medal designs for the Swiss government and the International Olympic Committee.

The third of eight children born into a working-class family, Hans Erni attended the local Lucerne elementary school before entering an apprenticeship as a surveyor. Beginning at the age of fifteen, he apprenticed for three years as a draftsman until his entrance into the Lucerne School of Arts and Crafts in 1927. Erni continued his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris and Berlin’s School of Applied Arts under Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin.

Between 1930 and 1933, Erni alternated stays in Lucerne and Paris where he became acquainted with contemporary French painting and influenced by the works of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and Cubist painter Georges Braque. Through the Abstraction-Création group in Paris, Erni became acquainted with artists Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Constantin Brancusi, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. During the early 1930s, he participated in several collective exhibitions and painted fresco murals in city of Lucerne.

After his travels to Belgium, Italy and England, Hans Erni began in 1936 to explore Abstraction with his first public mural commissions. This series of murals included frescoes for Lucerne’s General Building Cooperative, Switzerland’s section at the 1936 Triennale in Milan, and two educational murals entitled “Saline” and “Wasserkraftwerk (Hydroelectric Power Station)”. In 1937, Erni co-founded the Allianz, an association of Swiss abstract artists that advocated, with an additional emphasis on color, the concrete art theoriesof Swiss painter and designer Max Bill. Advancing the concept of Abstraction, Concrete Artists fully realized the idea that a painting could represent even an intangible algebraic formula rather than a person or an object.

Erni had his first major public success in 1939 with a mural, entitled “Switzerland: Vacation Land of the People”, that was specifically commissioned and displayed for the Zürich National Exhibition. In 1940, Erni entered into the Swiss Army where he served, until his discharge in 1945, as a camouflage painter due to his painting skills. In 1948, Erni presented his work in the painting competitions at the Summer Olympics held in London; he also participated between 1950 and 1952 in several Latin American exhibitions.

After a period of painting in Guinea and Mauritania, Hans Erni, along with Swiss graphic artists and illustrators Kurt Werth, Celestino Piatti, Alfred Pauletto and Hugo Wetli, organized a 1960 graphic design and painting exhibition in the Solothum canton city of Olten. He also exhibited his graphic design work in the 1964 Documenta Exhibition in the central German city of Kassel. Erni often employed allegories and figures, both contemporary and from Greek mythology. in his work. His symbolic Realist images presented large, powerful forms constructed with lines of a high degree of precision.

Erni created many works in the 1970s and 1980s among which were a tapestry “People, Viticulture and Fishing” for the cit of Küsnacht; a concrete relief mural “Primal Nature and the Work of Man” for the Téléverbier Valley Station in Médram, France; a mural “Man’s Advance into Space” for the Aerospace Hall of the Swiss Museum of Transport; and an aluminum relief “The Human Flight” for the United Nations building of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal. Erni also created a thirty-meter long mural “Panta Rhei” for the auditorium of Lucerne’s Hans Erni Museum which was founded on his seventieth birthday in 1979.

In his career, Hans Erni designed twenty-eight high-relief medals as well as one official Commemorative coin for the Swiss Confederation. In recognition for his Olympic medal designs, he received the 1989 Sport Artist of the Year award from the United States Sports Academy, a private university offering masters and doctoral degrees in sport education. Erni designed ceramics, theatrical sets and costumes, illustrations for Swiss postage stamps, and art for Swiss bank notes in the 1940s. Although the bank notes were printed, they were never released due to unfounded political objections by a member of the Lucerne State Council.

Beginning in 1989, retrospective exhibitions of Erni’s work were held in various cities. Two retrospectives were held in Japan, the first at the Himeji City Museum of Art and the second at the Itami City Museum of Art. In 1990, a retrospective was held at the Seibu Museum of Art in Funabashi, Japan, and at India’s Nehru Center in Bombay, now Mumbai. In 1995, Erni was guest of honor at the XI Biennial of International Sports and Arts in Madrid; Queen Sofia of Spain opened the exhibition and presented Erni with the Medal of Honor for his life’s work.

In addition to his paintings and sculptures, Hans Erni created illustrations for approximately two hundred published books and images for ninety Swiss postage stamps. He continued to create work throughout his later years. Among his last works were a 2011 medal entitled “Forest is Life” for the United Nations International Year of Forests and the 2012 stained glass windows for the Protestant Church in Martigny, Switzerland. Hans Erni died at the age of one hundred and six in Lucerne on the twenty-first of March in 2015.

The Hans Erni Museum, a detached hexagonal building, is part of the Swiss Museum of Transport complex in Lucerne. It houses an extensive collection of Erni’s work and provides insights into a life engaged with historical, cultural, technical and ecological themes. A public assemblage of Hans Erni’s work from private collections can be viewed at The Open Hans Erni Collection site located at: https://www.hans-erni-collection.org/en/

Notes: The online RTS magazine has ten short video documentaries (French language) in its Culture et Arts section at: https://www.rts.ch/archives/dossiers/3477775-hans-erni-un-artiste-emblematique-de-la-suisse.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hans Erni”, circa late 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Drei Freunde (Three Friends)”, 1970, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 28 x 40 cm, Private Collection, Australia

Third Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Dames des Décans- Pisces”, 1970, Lithograph on Arches Paper, Artist Edition, 50 x 65 cm, Private Collection, Switzerland

Fourth Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Badende”, 1960, Lithograph, 35 of 150 Edition, 47.7 x 39.7 cm, 1993 Catalogue “Hans Erni-Stiftung, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Franco Tettamanti, “Hans Erni, Lucerne”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Artist

The Artwork of Eduardo Mac Entyre

Born in February of 1929 at Buenos Aires, Eduardo Mac Entyre was an Argentine artist. Although he created work in the traditions of abstract, cubist and figurative art, he is best known for the geometric paintings fashioned through a series of random algorithms. Although evocative of thirteenth-century Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci’s nautilus designs, Mac Entyre’s paintings, due to their randomness, are more complex as each formed helix is unique.

Born to a Scottish father and Belgian mother, Eduardo Mac Entyre was encouraged at an early age by his mother and maternal grandfather to create art. He began his artistic pursuit with experimental drawings that studied the rules of composition contained within the works of Rembrandt, Hans Holbein and Albrecht Dürer. In the 1950s, Mac Entyre followed these studies with paintings that were executed in Cubist and Impressionistic styles.

In 1952, Mac Entyre became a member of the Grupo Ioven (Young Group), a post-WWII association of young artists who distanced themselves, often through the creation of geometric abstractions, from the artistic orthodoxy in Argentina at the time. He also studied the works of the Bauhaus and Concrete Art movements as well as the theories of Swiss graphic artist Max Bill and Belgian abstract painter Georges Vantongerloo, a founding member of the Dutch pure-abstract movement De Stijl. Mac Entyre, at this time, became a member of the Commission of the Asociación Arte Nuevo and contributed articles for its “A.N.” magazine.

In 1954, Eduardo Mac Entyre entered his work at the group exhibition held at Galeria de Arte Comte in Buenos Aires. It was at the 1959 exhibition at the Galería Peuser in Buenos Aires that his work was brought to the attention of art patron Ignacio Pirovano and Rafael Squirru, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. Recognized for his work, Mac Entyre joined other abstract artists, most notably Miguel Ángel Vidal, in the formation of the Generative Art movement that was expanded later by such established computer artists as mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot.

Mac Entyre and Miguel Vidal are considered the main representatives of geometric abstract art in Argentina. It was art patron Ignacio Pirovano who suggested the term ‘Generative Art” to characterize their artistic endeavors. In 1960, the Generative Art group’s first exhibition was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires and held at the Galería Peuser where the group presented its founding manifesto. The values contained in its manifesto influenced later generations of artists, both in Argentina and throughout the world. In 1961, Mac Entyre was selected as one of the artists to participate in the Argentina Section of the Sixth São Paulo Biennial which was organized by Rafael Squirru.

Mac Entyre created a distinct, aesthetic visual language of vibration and motion by arranging and juxtaposing geometric closed shapes and curved lines, executed in acrylics, to generate new forms on a flat canvas. His meticulous and precise rendering of the circular elements produced subtle variations of movement and rotation, aided by translucent colors at the intersecting points. Originally sketched by hand from a series of random algorithms, Mac Entyre’s symmetrical paintings developed alongside computer technology. In 1969, he experimented with vibratory effects in drawings produced with software developed by IBM.

Under the recommendation of portrait painter Franz van Riel and art critic Jorge Romero Brest, Eduardo Mac Entyre participated in the Torcuato di Tella Institute, a non-profit foundation for the promotion of Argentine culture. In 1982, he received the Konex Award as one of the most important geometric painters in Argentina. Selected by UNESCO as one of the most representative artists of Argentina, Mac Entyre received an award from the Maria Calderon de la Barca Foundation for his painting “Christ, the Light”. This painting was later donated to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Vatican City, Italy.

Eduardo Mac Entyre died in Buenos Aires on the fifth of May in 2014 at the age of eighty-five. In addition to private collections, his work is housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Ringling Museum, and the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, among others.

Note: The official site for Eduardo Mac Entyre, sponsored by the city of Buenos Aires, can be located at: https://www.instagram.com/eduardo_mac_entyre/reels/

Second Insert Image: Eduardo Mac Entyre, Untitled, 1973, Screen Print on Paper, 110.4 x 74 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, Kensington, England

Third Insert Image: Eduardo Mac Entyre, “Sin Título (Untitled)”, 1950, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 70 cm, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires

Bottom Insert Image: Eduardo Mac Entyre, “Hacia Un Extremo (Towards an Extreme)“, Date Unknown, Acrylic on Canvas, 80 x 80 cm, Private Collection