H.A. Sigg: Abstract Rivers

H.A. Sigg was born in Switzerland in 1924 and studied in Zurich and later Paris, where he was especially captivated by the art of French Nabi painter Pierre Bonnard. Although his paintings of the 1950s adhere to a figurative idiom, he evolved a purely abstract style, whose graceful, atmospheric and minimalist forms and motifs were inflected by aerial views of Southeast Asia, a vantage point he was afforded in 1968 when he was invited by Swissair to fly as "artist in residence in the sky.” From his privileged, sweeping view from the cockpit, he made sketches of the distant topography below. These became the inspiration and the source of the lithe and geometric abstractions suggestive of terraced fields and gently meandering rivers that characterize his work beginning in the 1970s. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, H.A. Sigg: The River  explores the art of one of the major Swiss painters of our day. Hermann Alfred (H.A.) Sigg (born June 29, 1924) has employed "an impeccable means of physical presentation to make the image radically new" (Lucie-Smith). Inspired by nature, meditations, contemplations, dreams and spiritual magic, Sigg's visual poetry is a continual oscillation between the Modernist tradition and a much earlier Romantic one. Color reproductions of ninety unique and distinctive paintings, collages and sculptures, spanning Sigg's seventy-year career, populate this cogent, edifying and revelatory book.

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