In the 1968 exhibition Wege und Experimente in the Kunsthaus Zürich, Haubensak, whose painting Paravent attracted attention in the show, was celebrated as an innovator in concrete art. During his career Haubensak has clung to the image, but with his canvases, shaped into pyramids, he places himself entirely in the tradition of representatives of Post-Painterly Abstraction and Hard-Edge Painting, which turned away from the traditional panel painting around 1960. In their composition they point beyond the classical genres of painting and sculpture, and play with the ambivalence between image and object. The engagement with American trends in Haubensak’s artistic process lead not to further development but to the overcoming of classical Concrete Art. Paravent, Gate and Ohne Titel are testimony to this revolution. The most recent work in the collection shows three inverted pyramids arranged above one another. The simple geometrical forms – only the first figure is fully created – reveal an orange cone and a beige ground. Using the shaped canvas method the artist achieves a structure that guides the viewer’s eye into the depths of the space.

Amongst the inspirations for his use of colour Haubensak cites the virtuoso artists Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906) and Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954). While the colours in his later groups of paintings such as Doors of Perception (1968-1974) or Tetras (from 1988) appear richer and more sophisticated, at the beginning of his artistic career he concentrates on a smooth and impersonal application of paint. The broken earth tones in Ohne Titel reinforce the associations with Egyptian desert structures, and with their contrast between light and dark emphasise the impression of lightness and heaviness.