Jan Schoonhovenartist • painter • watercolourist • draughtsman • printmaker • sculptorDelft 1914-1994

Jan Schoonhoven, who is best known for his monochrome (white) wall reliefs, formulated the principles of his art in the early 1960s. Art was not allowed to express personal feelings. Art had to be impersonal and objective. He achieved this by piling up elementary forms or by a rhythmic repetition of lines. He thus formed the basis of the Nul group, the Dutch version of the international Zero group. In the 1940s, abstract-figurative impressions of towns and houses in a flat pattern of repeated horizontals and verticals heralded his later reliefs. Schoonhoven's drawings, usually in Indian ink, also show a pattern in which each line is drawn differently.