Jan Schoonhoven earned a place as one of the most important Dutch artists of the last century, for his sculptural wall reliefs and drawings that anticipated Minimalism with their ordered arrangements of lines, crosses, squares, dots, and planes. Born in Delft in 1914, Schoonhoven spent most of his life there, enrolling in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Delft in 1930, and later working as postal clerk until retiring in 1976. Schoonhoven solidified his artistic style at the age of 45, first experimenting with the intuitive expressions of Informel as a key member of the Nederlandse Informele Groep (Netherlandish Informel Group) between 1958 and 1960. In 1960, Schoonhoven established Nul-groep (Nul Group), the Dutch counterpart of Zero Group, an international art movement that advocated for art devoid of color and individual expression. This same year, Schoonhoven produced his first signature wall reliefs, composed of corrugated paper painted over with white pigment. Schoonhoven's oeuvre could be dissected entirely in terms its oscillation between "order" and "chaos," two words the artist himself used in relation to his work: "Chaos is chaos. Order is order. And both belong together."[1] While neither order nor chaos completely dominates his work, the serial drawings and wall reliefs from 1960–1979 tend to veer toward order in their grid-like precision and repetition. After 1979, and following the artist's own retirement from his bureaucratic employment, irregularity tends to emerge. His later work continues to explore this dialectic of precision and flexibility, hierarchy and freedom, all organized into white and black as part of a predetermined size of wall relief or paper composition.

Schoonhoven's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and Situation Kunst, Bochum, Germany, among others. Schoonhoven's work was recently featured in the group exhibition Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which opened in October 2014. The artist passed away in Delft in 1994.

CEJ

[1] Beat Wismer, "Balanced Oppositions," in Jan J. Schoonhoven: Retrospektiv (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 67.