Francis Bott
Born in 1904.
Died in 1998.
His painting bears the imprint of a life shaped by exile, political commitment and movement between Paris and Ticino. After fleeing Nazi Germany, he stayed in Prague, where his encounter with Oskar Kokoschka encouraged him to pursue his artistic path. He subsequently moved to Paris, where he maintained a studio for many years, even after settling in Italian-speaking Switzerland.
From the 1950s onwards, Bott adopted abstraction. The works of his Informel period privilege the density of matter and the force of colour relationships. A gouache entitled «Komposition», dated 1959 and held by the Kunsthaus Zürich, attests to the presence of his work in Swiss collections from that time onwards.
Around 1968, his painting took on a different character: impasto gave way to more uniform areas of colour and straight lines that organise the space. In the series «Espaces concertés» and «Cathédrales», orthogonals and diagonals open up a suggested depth within a precise geometric construction.
Bott’s connection with Ticino grew stronger from 1970 onwards, when his wife Aida Hussein worked there as a doctor. The artist then divided his time between his places of residence in Ticino and Paris, before settling in Breganzona. The donation of approximately 650 works made by his widow to the municipality of Massagno in 2016 made it possible to present his Informel and geometric phases in succession.
This trajectory reveals a constant quest: to give form, through changing pictorial means, to an open and constructed idea of space.
