Richard Paul Lohse

Swiss graphic artist and painter Richard Paul Lohse was an innovator of Constructivist and Concrete art. He is renowned for his nonrepresentational works with color combinations based on mathematical formulas. These visually arresting geometric works are highly sought after; an oil-on-canvas composition of rainbow-hued horizontal and vertical lines, dated 1955, fetched $353,633 at auction in 2014. Lohse joined the advertising agency Max Dalang as a teenager in 1918 and established his own graphic design studio in 1930. After early experiments with Cubism in the 1920s, his painting focused on curves and diagonals in the 1930s. In 1937, Lohse co-founded Allianz, a Swiss artist group dedicated to advancing Concrete art, with Leo Leuppi. He turned to his breakthrough serial color combinations in the 1940s. Lohse was included in Documenta in 1968 and 1982 and represented Switzerland in the 1972 Venice Biennale. He has had several major retrospectives.