Gerrit Rietveld

Gerrit Rietveld was born in Utrecht on 24 June 1888, the son of a carpenter. At the age of 11 he left school to study with his father and enrolled in night school, then worked as a draughtsman for C. J. Begeer, a jeweller in Utrecht. By the time he opened his own furniture workshop in 1917, Rietveld had learned to draw, paint and make models. He then started a business as a cabinetmaker.

Even in his time,Rietveld hoped that most of his furniture would eventually be mass-produced rather than handmade, and so he aimed for simplicity of construction. His work was influenced by the De Stijl movement, of which he became a member in 1919, the same year he became an architect. The protagonists of this style achieved pure abstraction and universality by reducing the basics of shape and colour - simplifying visual composition to vertical and horizontal directions and using only primary colours along with black and white. And it is precisely this philosophy that is reflected in Gerrit Rietveld's unconventional works.