Bob Bonies

“How can it be, with such a limitation, that you don’t end up repeating yourself. In my case it’s a matter of: Art evolves from art. The result is nothing but art”

Since the early 1960s, Bonies (b. The Hague, 1937) has worked exclusively with geometric shapes and the primary colours red, yellow, blue, plus green and white if required. These colour elements emerge according to a mathematical system, and he then arranges them. Colour and form and the space between are, for Bonies, the building blocks for constructions that speak for themselves  and are also in a relationship with the surrounding space. In his oeuvre, now spanning some sixty years, form and colour have been completely liberated from any servitude to descriptive depiction or allusion: Concrete Art, it is what you see. Or is there more to it?

40 years ago, for a retrospective of Bob Bonies work in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the graphic designer Walter Nikkels designed  the catalogue for this exhibition with a text by Rudi Fuchs. For this book we have the same ‘winning’ team expanded with a contribution of Jetteke Bolten-Rempt and published by  Verlag der Buchhandlung  Walther und Franz König in Cologne.  
Bob Bonies  applies his approach of reducing things to their essence also to publications about his work. Since the 1960s he has insisted that every catalogue, art book, newspaper or magazine are illustrated not with photographs of his paintings, but with graphic representations. To see, in this way, 220 paintings by Bonies over six decades makes this an unique publication, which is therefore a work of art in itself.

Walther Koenig Books