In depth: art

Erwin Bechtold

Painter, 1925–2022·Ibiza

The Cologne-born painter of angle and surface who lived in Sant Carles for over 60 years.

By the ULTIMATE Ibiza Editorial Team

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For more than sixty years a German abstract painter shown at documenta lived quietly in the north-east of Ibiza. Erwin Bechtold came to the island in the 1950s, helped to found the artists’ group Grup Ibiza 59, and spent his long life refining a language of angles, surfaces and space.

From the print shop to Léger

Bechtold was born in Cologne on 12 April 1925. He trained as a printer and typesetter and took his master’s diploma at the Kölner Werkschulen in 1950, a grounding in type, layout and the printed page that never left his painting.

In 1950–51 he studied at Fernand Léger’s painting school in Paris. Stays in Barcelona followed, where he came to know the avant-garde group Dau al Set and held his first exhibition in 1956, and a long stay in Berlin in 1957.

Ibiza and Grup Ibiza 59

He discovered Ibiza in 1954 and settled there in 1958, in the village of Sant Carles de Peralta. The house he designed for himself has been called a model of independent modern architecture with traditional Balearic roots.

In 1959 he was one of the founders of Grup Ibiza 59, the artists’ group formed on the island, and began to take part in group and solo exhibitions at the El Corsario gallery. Five years later the first Ibiza Biennial opened, and in 1969 the island gained MACE, one of the oldest museums of contemporary art in Spain.

Angle, surface, space

His early work was informal and gestural: sensual forms on large white surfaces. From 1966 the first signs of geometry appeared, and from 1974 he explored the margin and the disturbance of a basic form, before beginning in 1987 the long series on angle, surface and space that occupied him for the rest of his life.

The result is painting of great calm and precision, in which a single fold or angle across a flat field seems to open a space.

The result is painting of great calm and precision, in which a single fold or angle across a flat field seems to open a space. A German monograph by Kirsten Maria Limberg described it as painting between chance and order.

Honours and shows

In 1968 he showed at documenta 4 in Kassel. He won the Joan Miró Prize in 1973 and first prize at the sixth Ibiza Biennial in 1974, and in 1988 completed the façade of the Museum Weltkulturen D5 of the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim, the largest of his works made for architecture.

Ibiza honoured him with the Premio Islas Pitiusas in 1999, the Balearic Islands with the Ramon Llull Prize in 2006, and in 2020 the Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg held a retrospective and gave his work a room of its own. He also won the FAD prize for interior design in 1961 and an honorary FAD medal in 2010.

A life in Sant Carles

Bechtold died at Santa Eulària des Riu on 2 September 2022, aged 97. Sant Carles, with its white church and its countryside of pine, carob and dry-stone walls, is still the quiet village he chose in 1958.

Our advice: walk around Sant Carles and its church, then visit MACE in Dalt Vila to see how the Ibiza Biennial years shaped the island’s modern art. To see Bechtold’s own paintings, follow the programmes of MACE and the Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg, and check before you go.