Jan Schoonhoven was born in 1914 in Delft. He studied at the Academy in The Hague 1932-63 and was employed as a civil servant in the post office since 1946.

His early works include Klee-like watercolours and pen and ink drawings. In the 1950s, he began to make drawings and paintings of a tachiste character, followed by reliefs in papier-mâché as from 1957, at first coloured and with an organic, irregular structure.

Along with Armando, Henk Peeters and Jan Henderikse, Schoonhoven established the Dutch branch of the international Zero Movement in the early 1960s. Zero stood for a return to the essence - by working with everyday materials, e.g. a relief made of toilet rolls - would be included in the exhibition. Influenced by the spatial works of Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana, Schoonhoven began to produce reliefs. Slowly but surely his paintings transformed into sculptures: objects with a regularly divided plane, repeated patterns that never became mechanical, because the hand of the maker was always visible.

His first one-man exhibition outside of Holland was at Galerie Wulfengasse, Klagenfurt in 1965. He was awarded the Second Prize at the 1967 Sao Paulo Biennial.

"You've got to strive for the minimum, but you can never do it anonymously", Schoonhoven once said.

He died in 1994