In 1993, whilst a student – with correspondingly limited financial means – Zurich-based IC Collector Tobias Hestler, purchased his first concrete-constructive print – and by late 1994, he’d already bought the first works on paper by Frank Badur. Here, Hestler presents his exhibition “Homage to Frank Badur” which was shown in the spring and summer of 2016 in his collection space in Thalwil, Switzerland.

“Frank Badur occupies an important position in my collection and in my life as a collector: his works and exhibitions, the time I have spent with him in person, and his role as a direct or also indirect mediator have repeatedly provided illuminating and sometimes formative impulses for my involvement with art over the last twenty years.

I collect artworks that belong, in the widest sense, to the realm of concrete-constructive, non-representational, minimalist art. Reduction, proportion, rhythm, and structures interest me. The “achromatic colors” black and white, the contrasts and changes undergone by some artworks when subjected to light and shadow fascinate me. In its simplicity and strength, black has always drawn me in. Most of the works in my collection have been reduced to geometrical elements and structures, to shapes, lines, and a few colors (primarily black, white, brown, and gray). I find it exciting when an artwork challenges our eyes and mind, when – in spite of its clarity and reduction – it does not permit itself to be grasped at first glance and provides a stimulus for closer viewing and reflection.

From the very beginning, what has interested me in Badur’s work has been his handling of color, his sense for distributing two-dimensional forms, and his concentration on the essential: the clarity of his early compositions consisting of vertical stripes, the subsequent rectangular divisions of the picture plane featuring a smaller field of color placed inside a larger one, and then – over the last fifteen years – the pictorial arrangements constructed from narrow, horizontally layered areas of color. A large part of my collection consists of drawings, and Badur was also a truly great discovery in this respect: his early drawings and watercolors, his hand-made paper works, and later his gouaches and the group of “Grid Drawings."

I collect artworks that belong, in the widest sense, to the realm of concrete-constructive, non-representational, minimalist art. Reduction, proportion, rhythm, and structures interest me.

TOBIAS HESTLER