13 Quotes by Max Bill

When a figure is balanced on a pivot in space it becomes elongated in all four directions; that is the basic principle behind this square on a pivot.

Even in modern art, artists have used methods based on calculation, inasmuch as these elements, alongside those of a more personal and emotional nature, give balance and harmony to any work of art.

In one of these recently conquered domains, the artist is now free to exploit the untapped resources of that vast new field of inspiration.

I made the first Moebius strip without knowing what it was.

We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony...

Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.

Fine art is in the last consequence, philosophy expressed visually.

Thus, the more succinctly a train of thought was expounded, and the more comprehensive the unity of its basic idea, the closer it would approximate to the prerequisites of the mathematical way of thinking.