Ten
Ten Artists, Ten Paintings, Ten Weeks
An Exhibition of Abstraction curated by Ian Johnson and Arthur Roberts
of Loop Gallery
September 18 - 28 November 2004
Open Monday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm, Sunday 12 noon - 4pm
Admission free
Abstraction may actually be as old as art itself, but conventional
wisdom insists it emerged from the frenzy of movements and counter-movements
surging through Europe in the first decades of the 20th century.
Indeed, the modern period in both literature and art was characterised
by a barrage of 'isms': Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism,
Suprematism, Rayonnism, and later Surrealism and Dadaism expressed
teh urgent desire to break with tradition and create a new idiom
in tune with a new age of technological wonders. Photography and
film had a deep impact on visual thinking, as did streamlining and
aeronautics. (The author Gertrude Stein claimed that she first truly
understood Cubism when looking down from a plane.) Often the young
revolutionaries, particularly those in Russia and Italy, were intent
on using art to propogate a new social order, as well.
Finding a visual idiom to convey such a broad-scale reorientation
was plainly no easy task, as the strident manifestos and jostling
'isms' of the day amply demonstrate. The most recognisable radical
stance was that which abandoned the mimetic role painting and sculpture
and literature had been assigned since the time of Aristotle. Viewed
in this context, one of the earliest and most influential works
was Kasimir Malevich's 'Black Square on White Ground', which the
artist painted in 1913 but first exhibited in 1915 in Petrograd
in a show entitled '0.10'. It is that anthology of modernist hypotheses
which inspired the title of the current Liverpool exhibition, 'Ten'.
What this show makes clear is that the resources of abstraction
continue to be as diverse as the artists who embrace the mode. Malevich
himself, who pursued the geometrical strand of abstraction for a
time, then became gestural and later embraced the figurative once
more, spoke of abstraction as a 'New Realism'. He also saw it as
the embodiment of emotional values, expressed through 'the supremacy
of pure feeling in creative art'.
Looking back on a century of abstract achievement, one can identify
entire schools of painterly expression. Defining the abstract as
non-figurative simply does not suffice; it can be geometric and
hard-edged, gestural and emotional, coolly minimal or passionately
maximal. As Frank Stella once said of his own early abstract compositions:
'What you see is what you see'. And that remark points in turn to
one of abstraction's greatest and most consistent strengths: the
ability to make us see. Where figuration sometimes provokes little
more than a moment of recognition, abstraction can activate perceptive
faculties and hone interpretive skills. And as 'Ten' demonstrates,
its resources are far from exhausted.
Prof. Dr. David Galloway
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