Schoonhoven, Jan (1914-1994). — "M-V", Embossing/ Relief print on handmade paper,

59 x 50 cm., titled and numbered "M-V - 8/120" and signed and dated in pencil "Schoonhoven 1972", Galerie M (Bochum, Germany), mounted "floating" in a white wooden frame, behind art glass (82,8 x 73 cm.). = Relief print from the famous M series, that Schoonhoven published with Galerie M in Bochum in 1972. The complete folder consists of a total of 8 different relief prints, this copy being number M-V. Jan Schoonhoven (Delft, 1914 - Delft, 1994) is widely known for his extensive and systematic investigations into light, form, and volume through his sculptural wall reliefs and works on paper, was a co-founder of the experimental Dutch Nul Group in 1960 in Delft, The Netherlands - the Dutch equivalent of ZERO - and played a central role in the Nederlandse Informele Groep (Netherlandish Informal Group).Jan Schoonhoven developed an artistic style governed by order, geometry and repetition is best known for his minimalist papier-maché reliefs and ink drawings from the 1960s. In the 1970s, his work veered toward grid-based formalism, and in the 1980s he made gestural drawings that referenced architectural form and space. A postal employee for 30 years, an occupation that profoundly shaped his views on objective, non-referential, non-hierarchal production. Schoonhoven’s clerical career was cut short after a 1967 performance piece, in which Yayoi Kusama painted Schoonhoven’s nude body with polka dots at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and is associated in Europe with fellow Nul artists Henk Peeters and Jan Henderikse, as well as Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana.Flip Bool and Enno Develing, typescript unpublished interview with Jan Schoonhoven, 11 January 1984, Henk Peeters Archive, RKD, Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague. Cited in: Antoon Melissen, Jan Schoonhoven, Rotterdam 2015, p. 88): "In 1964, the Dutch Nul group exhibited with German Zero artists Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker at the Gemeentemuseum The Hague. Under the exhibition title ‘Zero-0-Nul’, Jan Schoonhoven, Armando and Henk Peeters emphasised the specifically Dutch character of their ZERO-works. This was reflected in a predilection for industrial materials and a nod to ready-mades, to everyday objects ‘declared as art’. Jan Schoonhoven showed in The Hague his installation Kartonwand (1964), a stacking of unprocessed strips of rib cardboard. In retrospect, Schoonhoven judged this method of working as ‘truly ZERO’ because, after all, it originated ‘(...) from ZERO theories, the isolation of materials that thereby acquire a new reality.".