Systemic Painting PDF

Preview

Summary

Systemic Painting...

Description

Systemic Painting

In an exhibition organized by Lawrence Alloway (1926-1990), entitled Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1966, he included some artists who would play an important role in American painting of the '70s. In the text for the exhibition catalog, Alloway did not consider the term Systemic synonymous with mechanistic or inevitably impersonal aesthetics. Their exhibitions and catalogs are starting points or stations of exceptional importance for the post-war art. In stylistic analysis we look for unity within variety. At Systemic Painting we look for variety within the obvious section. In 1988 he said he saw in these artists a strong organizational principle with series of normally repeating geometric shapes. While in gesture painting colour was presented as the most disorganized element, in System Painting, it appeared more organized and it was more difficult to distinguish between line and colour. Some of the representatives of this trend use modern logic, architecture and mathematics as a basis, while others consider art as a lever for the reversal of logic. In other words, they utilize stimuli that start from modern technology and go as far as the ironic treatment of art by Duchamp. This is more about Minimal Art, which can be considered the parallel of Systemic Painting in plastic from the late '60s to the late' 70s. In the work of Agnes Martin (1912-2004), which has the basic characteristics of System Painting, the attempt to visualize an impeccable thought, a state of mind is evident. With a rectangular core, which gradually conquered the entire acrylic-painted surface and main articulating means, fine lines of graphite, which look like a grate and are imposed in the '70s, shape or submit to ethereal states, such as wind, sunlight, flicker of a vast field or even elements such as sand, water, tree. She says that behind and before self-expression, which is inevitable, there is a progressive awakening of the mind, which affects the work. The work calls this progressive vigilance. It is the most important tool of the project. It is the work in our minds, the work in our hands and the work as a result. The function of the work of art is to stimulate our sensibilities, to renew the memories of moments of perfection. Geometry is a kind of subtraction, but by itself not enough. It is a way to feel happy with ourselves, a level of selfawareness. It uses geometry because it allows for a direct, face-to-face experience and when treated in a certain way one can hint at something and calm down.

Started by Newman and Mondrian, Robert Mangold (1937-), one of the few painters theoretically accepted into the camp of Minimalism, exploited the potential of geometric vocabulary. He considered that the colours in many works of the Post-painting Abstraction acquired a decorative character and set as his goal not to allow them to exceed the structure (structure) or to be detached from it, emphasizing at the same time their opacity the flat surface and materiality of the work. He sees the inner lines of the composition being in direct relation to the outer contour of the canvas, typically saying that, for him, the edges of the painting are the first line. Everything seems to start and end at the end. He recognized that he was using geometry, but he did not mean geometry per se. He was interested in the idea of a kind of painting that, while divided into sections, would still exist as a whole. That is, the whole table could have four sections, split it in half and still have a table again. He considers painting a combination of surface and shape, rather than an object. His works have always been strict, frontal and their shape resulted from an abstract method. He had never painted all around the painting and was a highly intuitive artist in his works. The exhibition Abstraction Geometry Painting organized by Michael Auping in 1989 included 25 artists covering the entire spectrum of geometric abstraction in America from 1945 to the late '80s and also the so-called Neo-Geo (Neo-geometric Art), focusing on fermentation, in the 80s, Los Angeles. The most important artists are Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981), Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996), Gene Davis (1920-1985), Al Held (1928-2005), Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930-), Ludwig Sander, Larry Poons (1937-), Dorothea Rockburne (1932-), David Novros, Peter Halley (1953-). In essence, the postwar Abstraction followed the two main directions, uniquely identified by Alfred Barr in the catalog of the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. According to Barr, the first tendency, intuitive and emotional, rather than mental, originates from Gauguin's theories and, passing through Matisse and Kandinsky, reaches the late surrealists. The second, more important trend starts with Cezanne and through Cubism and Constructivism, ends with Mondrian's radical geometry. It is mental, structural, architectural, geometric, rectangular and classical in its rigor and its dependence on logic and mathematics. Auping, citing Apollinaire's phrase, that geometry is for the plastic arts, that grammar is for the writer and painter Charmion von Wiegand, that the house of abstract art is the two-dimensional surface, the level. He considers the adjective geometric as the most appropriate to characterize the abstraction after Abstract Expressionism, while at the same time observing that geometry is almost never the object of painting, but a means to achieve goals....