Born in Osnabrück, Germany on November 17, 1899, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart moved to Hanover in 1919 to study architecture and sculpture at the Kunstgewerbeschule and the Technische Hochschule. That same year he began to paint, employing a purely nonobjective vocabulary that he continued to use throughout his career. While in Hanover, Vordemberge-Gildewart met El Lissitzky (who eventually encouraged him to experiment with the concepts of Russian Suprematism), Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, and Theo van Doesburg, who invited him to join De Stijl in 1924. In 1925 he participated in the Paris exhibition L’art d’aujourd’hui, which featured a strong De Stijl presentation, and in 1927, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Schwitters, Hans Nitzschke, and Carl Buchheister formed the avant-garde group Die Abstrakten Hannover, championing abstraction in their region. Vordemberge-Gildewart’s first solo exhibition was held in 1929 at the Galerie Povolozky in Paris. The following year, he associated with members of Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square), an abstract artist’s group organized by Michel Seuphor. In 1932 Vordemberge-Gildewart joined the Abstraction-Création group, founded to promote abstraction during a resurgence of representational art in the 1920s. He moved from Hanover to Berlin in 1936, seeking refuge from the cultural censure of the Nazi regime, which labeled modern art as “degenerate art” (entartete Kunst). The Nazi Party of Munich displayed Vordemberge-Gildewart’s work in its Exhibition of Degenerate Art in 1937, and later confiscated it based on the claim that it was un-German. Under such pressures, the artist left Germany for Switzerland, and shortly thereafter traveled to Amsterdam on the occasion of the 1938 exhibition Abstracte Kunst organized by the Stedelijk Museum. He remained in Amsterdam during its years of German occupation and eventually became a Dutch citizen. In addition to painting and sculpture, Vordemberge-Gildewart was active in typographical design and the literary arts, publishing a volume of poetry in 1940 and founding the Amsterdam-based publishing house Duwaer in 1942. Committed to a nonobjective idiom, Vordemberge-Gildewart referred to his practice as “absolute art,” or art devoid of representation. From 1934 through the 1940s, he used color, form, and contrast to investigate the possibility of visual equilibrium among geometrically unequal components. Works like Composition No. 96 (1935) demonstrate his dedication to geometric abstraction with an emphasis on diagonal form. Often creating multiple versions of the same work, the artist would reconfigure the primary elements to investigate each component’s role in the composition. He also experimented with materials such as sand to create a textural quality that he designated rauh, or “rough.” In 1952 Vordemberge-Gildewart instructed on the use of color as an architectural element at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam. He became head of the department of Visual Communication at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany in 1954. During his lifetime, Vordemberge-Gildewart participated in a number of exhibitions, beginning with a presentation organized by the Société Anonyme at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (1926–27), and including the aforementioned Abstracte Kunst, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1938); Art of Tomorrow: Collection of Non-Objective Paintings, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1939); Premiers maîtres de l’art abstrait, Galerie Maeght, Paris (1949); De Stijl, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1951); De Stijl: 1917–32, at the Venice Biennale (1952); and the São Paulo Biennial (1953). His work has been featured in a number of posthumous exhibitions, including: De Stijl, Cercle et Carré, Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne (1974); Die Abstrakten Hannover, internationale Avantgarde 1927–1935, Sprengel Museum, Hanover (1987–88); and a major retrospective of his career at the IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, and Museum Wiesbaden (1996–97). Vordemberge-Gildewart died in Ulm, Germany, on December 19, 1962.