5/2 – 10/5 2026
Museum Haus Konstruktiv | Zurich | Switzerland
This comprehensive retrospective devoted to Richard Paul Lohse restores to full clarity a figure whose radical coherence feels strikingly contemporary. What unfolds across more than five decades of work is not simply the evolution of a painter, but the sustained articulation of a worldview — systematic, ethical, and intellectually uncompromising.
Lohse emerges not merely as a central protagonist of constructivist-concrete art, but as one of its most lucid theoreticians. What distinguishes him here is not only the formal precision of his paintings but the astonishing precocity of his method. As early as the 1940s, he was elaborating serial systems and rational colour structures that would only become widely theorized in the 1960s, anticipating developments in Minimalism, conceptual art, colour-field painting and even algorithmic aesthetics. This was no gradual stylistic drift toward geometry; it was a deliberate intellectual position. For Lohse, structure was never neutral. It carried ethical weight.
The exhibition concentrates on his work as a painter, presenting more than fifty works spanning from 1942 to 1987. This chronological arc allows viewers to witness the transition from early abstract explorations — still resonant with the spiritual geometry of Suprematism — to the fully developed orthogonal systems that became his signature. The early canvases float with curved and triangular forms in primary colours, but by 1943 Lohse decisively commits to the vertical, and soon thereafter to modular and serial systems that occupy the pictorial field in its entirety. The shift feels less like reduction than like conceptual sharpening.
Central to the reading of Lohse is the fusion of aesthetic logic and socio-political conviction. Marked by a childhood shaped by poverty, he maintained throughout his life a belief in social equality, and this belief was translated into compositional principles. His insistence on quantitative equality among colours — each hue granted identical weight and surface — is not decorative balance but visualized egalitarianism. When he declared that his works attempt to show how “the structures of the world could be improved,” he was not speaking metaphorically. The grid, in his hands, becomes a model of non-hierarchical order.
Particularly illuminating are the preparatory drawings, colour charts and construction plans that accompany the paintings. These documents — dense with annotations, numbers and diagrams — demystify the works without diminishing them. On the contrary, they reveal Lohse’s commitment to transparency. His assertion that his paintings could be “transmitted over the phone” underscores his conviction that artistic creation should not be cloaked in mystique but grounded in comprehensible systems. The viewer is invited into a dialogue based on clarity rather than romantic intuition.
The distinction between Modular Orders and Serial Orders provides a crucial framework. The modular works derive from systematic manipulations of a primary unit — rotated, expanded or multiplied — while the serial works unfold in complex chromatic sequences that may extend across eighteen or even thirty gradations. In these compositions, rhythm replaces gesture; dynamism arises not from expressive brushwork but from calibrated progression. The staggered arrangement of colour produces a visual pulse that is at once restrained and vibrantly alive.
The monumental three-part Serial Row Theme in Eighteen Colours stands as the apex of this logic. Structured as grids of 108 squares, each colour equivalent in area and frequency, the triptych challenges perception through repetition and variation. As one moves before it, relationships shift; colours advance and recede; the grid appears to reorganize itself. It becomes an open structure that incorporates both space and observer, demanding active visual engagement.
In the late works from the Nine Squares series, Lohse’s modular principles become increasingly condensed. Chromatic relations grow more refined, surfaces more saturated, and gradations more subtle. Over time, his paint handling becomes richer without sacrificing structural rigor. The works radiate intensity while remaining resolutely systematic — sensuality contained within logic.
What proves most compelling today is how contemporary Lohse feels. In an era shaped by algorithms, grids and systemic thinking, his paintings no longer appear austere; they seem prophetic. Long before digital or generative art, he conceived of painting as a rule-based structure capable of embodying social metaphor. His rationalism does not suppress perception — it sharpens it.
This retrospective ultimately reveals that what may once have been perceived as cool abstraction now reads as radical clarity. Lohse’s art proposes order without hierarchy, equality without uniformity. His grids do not confine; they articulate possibility. In 2026, that proposition feels not only art-historically significant, but quietly urgent.