Jan Schoonhoven, "R 71-24", 1971

From a very young age Dutch artist Jan J. Schoonhoven (1914 - 1994) started drawing water colours and abstract drawings. Between 1930 and 1934 he was enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and trained as a draughtsman. However, Schoonhoven did not end up solely as an artist, but spent his entire working life (1946 - 1979) at the P.T.T. in The Hague, the then government-owned company for postal services and telecom. A secure income enabled him to remain independent as an artist, which perfectly suited the image of a man with a great fondness for order and regularity. Once he had developed his own artistic language in the 1960s, this order and regularity lay at the core of his work.

At first, Schoonhoven practiced drawing exclusively. This changed in 1955 when Schoonhoven conceived his earliest reliefs after seeing the spatial works of Italian contemporaries Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana. A few years later and along with Armando, Henk Peeters, Kees van Bohemen and Jan Henderikse, Schoonhoven became a member of the 'Hollandse Informele Groep', the Dutch informal painters (1958 - 1960). He quickly abandoned this art movement and in reaction to the predominating informal painters he established the Dutch branch of the international ZERO movement, together with Armando, Henderikse and Peeters (1961 - 1966). They named their group Nul (0).