Jo Niemeyer (1946) - Archival n° 427

Jo Niemeyer: Untitled — Golden Section Spiral (1993), Archive no. 427

An original painting by Jo Niemeyer, a central figure of contemporary Concrete art, in which the Golden Section is not merely a guiding principle but the visible subject of the picture. On a white square, four coloured squares — red, yellow, blue and black — descend in size and wind inward in a clockwise turn. Each is scaled to the next by the golden ratio: red at roughly 0.618 of the picture's edge, yellow at 0.382, blue at 0.236, black at 0.146. Read in sequence, they trace the logarithmic spiral that mathematicians derive from the golden rectangle, the same proportion that governs the nautilus shell, the sunflower head and the branching of plants.

The palette — the primary triad and black on white — deliberately invokes De Stijl and Mondrian, yet the composition marks a decisive difference. Where Mondrian balanced his fields by eye, Niemeyer determines every position and dimension by a single mathematical rule. The result is a picture that is at once intuitive and demonstrable: what the eye reads as calm and inevitable, the ruler can confirm. This is the core of Niemeyer's lifelong project — to make visible, through mathematics and above all the Golden Section, the order underlying nature, and thereby to open a dialogue between art, science and the natural world.

The work is a painting-object: acrylic on canvas mounted on a wooden corpus made in the artist's own studio, 4.5 cm deep, so that the composition holds the wall with sculptural presence. Painted in 1993, hand-signed, and bearing the artist's archive stamp and number (no. 427). In excellent condition.

Title: Untitled (Golden Section Spiral) — Archive no. 427
Year: 1993
Technique: Acrylic on canvas on wood; hand-painted on a studio-made wooden corpus (unique work)
Signature: Hand-signed; artist's archive stamp and number 427
Dimensions: 49.5 × 49.5 × 4.5 cm
Condition: Excellent
Provenance: Swiss private collection

Jo Niemeyer (born 1946 in Alf, Germany) is a German Concrete artist and designer whose work rests on the observation of nature through mathematics and, above all, the Golden Section, and whose central themes are the perception of space, time, distance and proportion. He has held solo and group exhibitions across Scandinavia, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, the United States, England, Japan and Argentina, and has realised murals for public buildings in Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia. His work is held in public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk. He lives and works in Germany, France and Finland.

Selected solo exhibitions: Felluss Gallery, Washington D.C. (1976); Apogee Gallery, Princeton (1977); Art Package, Chicago (1978); Galerie von Bartha, Basel (1980); Galerie Wack, Kaiserslautern (1980); Artek, Helsinki (1983); Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyväskylä (1984); Hans-Thoma-Museum, Bernau (2002); Institut für Konstruktive Kunst, Rehau (2003); Vordemberge-Gildewart Museum, Osnabrück (2007); Arithmeum, Bonn (2009).