Abstraction Art Gallery

Untitled (Winged Curve)

Although printed in 1966, Winged Curve was not published at that time. The work had been printed on rectangular sheets and Riley felt, then, that the image had not quite worked. The edition was kept in the studio and it was upon rediscovery and long consideration, around the turn of the century, that the decision was taken to crop the sheet to the near-square format that we see today. This adjustment resolved Riley's concerns and, happily, the edition was signed and released in 2001. Riley's early black and white works marked a major breakthrough within her practice, forming the basis of an extraordinary six-decade-long enquiry into the mechanics of human perception. Her previous works consisted largely of homages to Georges Seurat, whose Pointillist technique was a key source of inspiration to the young artist.

Painterly Architectonic

Influenced by her visits to western Europe before World War I, Popova helped introduce into Russian art the Cubist and Futurist ideas she encountered in France and Italy. Her model of abstraction is implied by her use of the term “architectonic”: treating planes almost as solid material entities, Popova built a monumental composition focused on the interrelationships between individual parts. In 1916 Popova became a Suprematist, a term coined the previous year by artist Kazimir Malevich to describe an art that rejected painting's historic devotion to representation, focusing instead on the supremacy of pure artistic feeling. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, in 1917, many artists took up Malevich's aim, believing that a revolutionary society demanded a radically new artistic language.

Untitled

Wool's early foray into painting was inspired by the sight of graffiti covering a delivery truck, and the visual vernacular of the city street continues to inform his work. In Untitled, running drips of sprayed paint recall the casual, hurried application of graffiti. Black lines are obscured by thin washes of gray paint wiped over them, suggesting some illegible language. Layers of accumulation and erasure evoke the archaeology of city walls with their residual traces of appearance and disappearance, in a monument not to order but to uncertainty and randomness.

Orange

Kandinsky made Orange when he was a teacher at the Bauhaus, the innovative and influential modernist art and architecture school in Germany, where he began working in 1922. His work during this period was characterized by precise lines and dense groups of simple geometric shapes arranged without any central focus. In his writings Kandinsky analyzed the geometrical elements and the various ways that their color, placement, and interaction could affect the viewer, both physically and spiritually. He considered the circle to be the most elementary form, possessing a cosmic meaning.