Jan Schoonhoven

Jan Schoonhoven was a founding member of the Dutch art group Nul, which was established in 1960 in rebellion against 1950s expressionistic painting. Rather than using active gesturalbrushwork, these artists aimed to represent space with uniform, monochromatic fields of color and serial compositions. By 1960 Schoonhoven had limited his palette exclusively to white, but there is still evidence of the artist’s hand at work in his minimalist wall reliefs. Slant Levels in Four Directions consists of a square panel divided into a grid of twenty-five squares, each of which consists of four smaller faceted square units. The geometric regularity is modified somewhat by the play of light across the variously tilted surfaces, creating a sense of depth, movement, and surprising variation.