Richard Paul Lohse

Richard Paul Lohse was born on September 13, 1902, in Zurich, Switzerland. He trained not in a fine-art academy but in commercial graphic design, apprenticing from 1918 to 1922 as an advertising draftsman with the Max Dalang agency in Zurich, an apprenticeship linked to the Zurich School of Applied Arts. He had wanted to study in Paris but could not afford to, and no completed academy degree is recorded for him; he remained largely self-taught as a painter even as he built a long parallel career as a graphic designer, typographer, and design theorist.

In 1937 Lohse co-founded Allianz, an association of modern Swiss artists, with Leo Leuppi, and he became a central figure of what is now called Zurcher Konkrete, the Zurich strand of Concrete art, alongside Max Bill, Verena Loewensberg, and Camille Graeser. From the 1940s he developed serial, modular compositions built from systematic color grids, an approach he treated as a visual analogue to democratic, non hierarchical social organization. He published the design text Neue Ausstellungsgestaltung in 1953 and co-edited the influential magazine Neue Grafik starting in 1958.

His international exhibition history grew steadily: a presentation at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, curated by Willem Sandberg in 1961; inclusion in documenta III in Kassel in 1964; a solo exhibition, Richard Paul Lohse: Selected Works, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970; and representation of Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1972. At documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, three large serial, horizontal paintings brought him wide international attention. He received the Art Award of the City of Zurich in 1973, using the prize money to buy work from younger colleagues. He is also reported, though not independently corroborated in the sources reviewed for this profile, to have received the Sikkens Prize in the Netherlands in 1971 and to have been named Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France in 1987. In 1987 he established the Richard Paul Lohse Foundation in Zurich. He died in Zurich on September 16, 1988, three days after his eighty sixth birthday.

Museum Haus Konstruktiv, which has exhibited Lohse in Zurich, describes him as a painter and graphic designer and situates him among the key figures of constructivist-concrete art, alongside Max Bill, Verena Loewensberg, and Camille Graeser as leading figures of the Zurcher Konkrete movement. Critical and curatorial writing on Lohse consistently returns to a pairing of formal rigor with social ambition: his grid based, serial paintings are read less as decorative abstraction than as visual arguments for order without hierarchy, a theme that recurs from his 1961 Stedelijk presentation through the three part serial paintings shown at documenta 7 in 1982 and into the touring 2025 to 2026 retrospective at MASI Lugano, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, and the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop.

Lohse's market is thin and largely secondary, reflecting a deceased European modernist whose reputation was built through museums and design history rather than through a deep bench of auction turnover. Reported auction results per Artsy's auction database include a 1955 oil on canvas built from horizontal and vertical color bands that sold for approximately USD 353,633 in 2014, though the auction house and exact sale date are not confirmed in currently available sources, so this figure should be treated as indicative rather than as a confirmed record. His work has recently drawn renewed commercial attention: Hauser and Wirth presented a dedicated exhibition of paintings and works on paper spanning the 1950s to 1980s at its Basel gallery in early 2025, and Galerie Haas in Zurich has exhibited his work as well, though no single gallery is documented as the estate's exclusive representative. The Richard Paul Lohse Foundation in Zurich is the consistent point of custodial authority across recent museum exhibitions.

Lohse has been deceased since 1988, so the supply of his work is fixed and any acquisition depends on tracing works already in private hands, galleries, or deaccessioned museum holdings. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed as published; the Richard Paul Lohse Foundation in Zurich functions as the primary source for provenance and authentication questions, and collectors should expect to work through it rather than through a single commercial gallery. Auction data for Lohse is sparse and not fully documented in public sources, so collectors should treat any single reported price, including the mid six-figure 2014 result noted above, with caution rather than as a settled benchmark. The clearest signal of durability is institutional: sustained inclusion in major Swiss and European museum collections and a 2025 to 2026 multi-venue retrospective spanning MASI Lugano, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, and the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop.