Bauhaus-Inspired Sculpture From a Master of Swiss Graphic Design

Design obsessives know the late Max Bill primarily as a major figure in the Swiss graphic design scene of the 1950s and beyond. But a new exhibition catalog from a retrospective on view earlier this year at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid reminds us that the designer was the ultimate polymath — an architect, silversmith, painter, industrial designer, and, most stunningly, sculptor of the geometric stone and metal pieces seen in the first half of this post (which sent us on a major Google Image search). A student of the Bauhaus who studied under Josef Albers and Paul Klee, Bill was also one of the progenitors of Concrete Art, a pure form of geometric abstraction that has no point of reference in the natural world. We’ve excerpted a few of our favorite Bill images below, but check out the monograph — the only one of Bill in print — here.