Max Bill

Max Bill was born in Winterthur in 1908 and lived in Zumikon, near Zurich, where he died in 1994.
The highly gifted Max Bill was a painter, sculptor, graphic designer, architect, industrial designer, typographer, art theorist and art teacher. A master of concrete art, he was one of the most important Swiss artists of the 20th century. In all his art, he used very basic shapes and forms. These simple aesthetics often were met with rejection.

After training as a silversmith from 1924 to 1927, Max Bill studied until 1929 at the ‘Bauhaus’ in Dessau under teachers such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Back in Zurich during the 1930s, he played a major role in the emergence of a constructivist ideal in Swiss graphic design. He developed his concept of concrete art, and his typographic works and posters, which used grids, geometric progressions and mathematical formulas, were pioneer works in that field. In 1944 and 1945, he worked as a lecturer at the ‘Kunstgewerbeschule’ (School of Arts and Crafts) in Zurich. In the 1950s, Bill was the co-founder, architect and head of the ‘Hochschule für Gestaltung’ in Ulm. In the 1960s, he was politically active as a municipal councillor and a member of the Swiss National Council. From 1967 to 1974, he worked as a professor at the ‘Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste’ in Hamburg.

Max Bill won numerous awards in Switzerland and abroad, and today he is still considered to be one of the most important representatives of concrete art.

Posters by Max Bill