Florin Granwehr (1942-2019)

Florin Granwehr (1942–2019) was an important figure in the Switzerland and especially Zurich art scene from the 1970s to the early 21st century. Most viewers will mainly encounter his work in the outdoor spaces of Swiss cities, where he created a number of objects. These works of his are based upon the precise technical realization of elegant geometric “poems.” But they are only the tip of the iceberg that is the artist’s extensive work, comprising sets of objects and a number of drawings. His work was based on the heritage of Zurich Concretism. However, his unique creative thinking took him far beyond the boundaries of Modernism. In his work, we can observe a very consistent direction towards a complex and unique grasp of his own work, which culminated in his late project of defining his own creative theorem.

Space has no argument
Meanwhile, his creative path also intersected with those of a number of prominent artistic personalities of the time. His work was based on the heritage of Zurich Concretism, and he was connected with its key personalities through personal contacts. However, his unique creative thinking took him far beyond the boundaries of the modernist heritage. In his work, we can observe both tendencies placing him close to the minimalism and conceptual art of the era, as well as, above all, a very consistent direction towards a complex and unique grasp of his own work, which culminated in his late project of defining his own creative theorem.
He was the husband of the prominent Czech and later Swiss art historian and theorist Ludmila Vachtová, thanks to whom he found his inspiration and personal and work contacts in the Czech environment as well, in an interesting way, there was a cultural overlap here across the Iron Curtain, which had otherwise become increasingly impenetrable since the 1970s.
Even today, most viewers will mainly encounter his work in the outdoor spaces of Swiss cities and institutions, where over the years he created a number of grandiose outdoor objects. These works of his are based upon the precise technical realization of elegant geometric “poems.” But they are only the tip of the iceberg that is the artist’s extensive work, comprising sets of very intimate objects, working models of them, and a number of drawings.
Florin Granwehr’s sculptural work went through a series of phases and parallel lines of development, which brought him to his characteristic rigorous geometric style as early as the 1980s. It was full of a fascination with the combinatorics of forms and the representation of transmutations of logical relationships through dialogues in space among intersecting lines. The artist embarked upon a years-long pilgrimage through the mathematical landscape of pure thought. Each of the thematic series of his works was in fact an analysis of one such spatial problem. While this focus on his strictly structured thought processes may in some ways recall the minimalism of his contemporaries, just as his emphasis on the plasticity of forms is akin to other Concretist tendencies of the period, ultimately Granwehr remains a distinctly solitary artist whose creative vocabulary has built up an almost spiritual aesthetic, leading viewers to alternative forms of precise sensibility.
But we should not forget about the other, period-specific manifestations of Granwehr’s work, from the early, dynamic abstract forms of the 1960s influenced by the pre-war avant-garde, to his long-standing dialogue with the paradigms of postmodernism, often dealing with architectural forms and archetypes. Indeed, Granwehr could not avoid these themes even in the realization of many of his often imposing works in public space: they themselves often bear the character of autonomous architecture.
Granwehr’s extensive body of drawings is then an integral part of his plastic line of thought. No matter whether we speak of the spatially ambivalent and sometimes even playful individual drawings of the 1970s and 1980s, or the much more disciplined geometric exercises of the years that followed—which eventually led him to the monumental body of drawings included in the Theorem project.