Figuration/Abstraction

Figuration/Abstraction PDF Author: Charlotte Benton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351567047
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The notion that the practice of abstraction was confined to Western Europe while a stereotyped form of figuration defined the art of the Eastern bloc continues to dominate art historical accounts of public sculpture of the post-war period. This book offers a number of alternative readings, and demonstrates strategic uses of figuration and abstraction across East and West. Encompassing sites of memory (including war memorials and Holocaust memorials), state, civic and corporate sculpture, as well as temporary and unexecuted projects, the book shows that persuasive advocates of figuration were to be found in the West, while in the East imaginative experiments in abstraction were proposed in the name of Social Realism. Presenting fresh insights into sculptural practice in the period between 1945 and 1968, this book brings together a wide range of authors, some of whom have never before been published in English. Their essays are complemented by extracts from documentary texts, which give a flavour of contemporary debates, and a biographical section includes entries on many sculptors who will be unfamiliar to an English-speaking audience.

Figuration/Abstraction

Figuration/Abstraction PDF Author: Charlotte Benton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351567047
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

Book Description
The notion that the practice of abstraction was confined to Western Europe while a stereotyped form of figuration defined the art of the Eastern bloc continues to dominate art historical accounts of public sculpture of the post-war period. This book offers a number of alternative readings, and demonstrates strategic uses of figuration and abstraction across East and West. Encompassing sites of memory (including war memorials and Holocaust memorials), state, civic and corporate sculpture, as well as temporary and unexecuted projects, the book shows that persuasive advocates of figuration were to be found in the West, while in the East imaginative experiments in abstraction were proposed in the name of Social Realism. Presenting fresh insights into sculptural practice in the period between 1945 and 1968, this book brings together a wide range of authors, some of whom have never before been published in English. Their essays are complemented by extracts from documentary texts, which give a flavour of contemporary debates, and a biographical section includes entries on many sculptors who will be unfamiliar to an English-speaking audience.

Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965

Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965 PDF Author: Caroline A. Jones
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520068421
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"Should be the classic, central, definitive work on the emergence of Bay Area Figurative painting."--Paul Mills, author of The New Figurative Painting of David Park

Figure and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting

Figure and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting PDF Author: Ronald Paulson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
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It's Figuration, Groundly

It's Figuration, Groundly PDF Author: John McGreal
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1788036433
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
John McGreal's three new books – It’s Abstraction, Concretely, It’s Figuration, Groundly and It’s Representation, Really – continue the ‘It’ Series published by Matador since 2010. They constitute another stage in an artistic journey exploring the visual and audial dialectic of mark, word and image that began over 25 years ago. Emerging out of the first books on the Bibliograph published in 2016, initiated with It’s Nothing, Seriously, these new texts retain some of the same structural features. The Bibliographs contain the same focus on repetition and variation in meaning of their dominant motifs of representation, abstraction and figuration which have framed philosophical discourse on epistemology and ontology in aesthetics; their chance placement in each Bibliograph interspersed with one another displaying and enhancing similarities and differences. At the same time these works constitute a development in the aesthetic form of the Bibliograph. In earlier works on Nothing, Absence and Silence, it was just a question of finding and transferring given textual references from their source to construct their Bibliographs, with the focus being on the strategic position of the latter within each book. In these new works, the concern has been with working on the line and shape of the references themselves, with their enhanced spacial form as well as that of each Bibliograph as a whole. In shaping and spacing the referential images, the place of words and letters became as important as their semantic & syntactical role. Expansion and contraction of whole words was used to enhance this process. Under such detailed attention their breakdown into particles of language, into part-words and single letters was a result. The recombination of elements produced new words in a process of restrangement with new sequences of letters having visual rather than semantic value. The play on prefixes of dominant motifs yielded new words as did tmesis. This concern with the form of referential images does not preclude an equal commitment to their content. The aleatory character of textual entries in each Bibliograph encourage the reader to let his or her mind go; to read in a new way on diverse contemporary issues across conventional boundaries in the arts and sciences at several levels of physical, psychical and social reproduction.

Mondrian

Mondrian PDF Author: Piet Mondrian
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
"Herbert Henkels provides an overview of Mondrian's transition from figuration to non-figurative art and recreates the cultural and intellectual background against which Mondrian's career and sense of mission as an artist unfolded. Copiously illustrated with archive photographs of Mondrian, his family, friends and studios, with pages from his sketchbooks and numerous reproductions of his works, the book also includes Mondrian's important essay Plastic Art and pure Art, published in the English Constructivist group's book Circle in 1937. The 116 colour plates which form the heart of the volume are accompanied by selected quotations from Mondrian's essay Dialogue and Trialogue of Neo-Plasticism (published in De Stijl, 1918-1920). Three interviews with the artist, an illustrated chronology with excerpts from Mondrian's letters, and a select bibliography complete this handsome volume."--back cover.

Abstract Crossings

Abstract Crossings PDF Author: María Amalia García
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520302192
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Toward the middle of the 1950s, abstract art became a dominant trend in the Latin American cultural scene. Many artists incorporated elements of abstraction into their rigorous artistic vocabularies, while at the same time, the representation of geometric lines and structures filtered into everyday life, appearing in textiles, posters, murals, and landscapes. The translation of a field-changing Spanish-language book, Abstract Crossings analyzes the relationship between, on the one hand, the emergence of abstract proposals in avant-garde groups and, on the other, the institutionalization and newfound hegemony of abstract poetics as part of Latin America’s imaginary of modernization. A profusion of mid-century artistic institutional exchanges between Argentina and Brazil makes a study of the trajectories of abstraction in these two countries particularly valuable. Examining the work of artists such as Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Tomás Maldonado, author María Amalia García rewrites the artistic history of the period and proposes a novel reading of the cultural dialogue between Argentina and Brazil. This is the first book in the new Studies on Latin American Art series, supported by a gift from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art.

Working Space

Working Space PDF Author: Frank Stella
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674959613
Category : Painting, Abstract
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Caravaggio -- The Madonna of the Rosary -- Annibale Carracci -- Picasso -- A common complaint -- The Dutch savannah.

The Iconology of Abstraction

The Iconology of Abstraction PDF Author: Krešimir Purgar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429557574
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This book uncovers how we make meaning of abstraction, both historically and in present times, and examines abstract images as a visual language. The contributors demonstrate that abstraction is not primarily an artistic phenomenon, but rather arises from human beings’ desire to imagine, understand and communicate complex, ineffable concepts in fields ranging from fine art and philosophy to technologies of data visualization, from cartography and medicine to astronomy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in image studies, visual studies, art history, philosophy and aesthetics.

The Truth Is Always Grey

The Truth Is Always Grey PDF Author: Frances Guerin
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452957258
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
Changing how we look at and think about the color grey Why did many of the twentieth century’s best-known abstract painters often choose grey, frequently considered a noncolor and devoid of meaning? Frances Guerin argues that painters (including Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Mark Rothko, and Gerhard Richter) select grey to respond to a key question of modernist art: What is painting? By analyzing an array of modernist paintings, Guerin demonstrates that grey has a unique history and a legitimate identity as a color. She traces its use by painters as far back as medieval and Renaissance art, through Romanticism, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernism to show how grey is the perfect color to address the questions asked by painting within art history and to articulate the relationship between painting and the historical world of industrial modernity. A work of exceptional erudition, breadth, and clarity, presenting an impressive range of canonical paintings across centuries as examples, The Truth Is Always Grey is a treatise on color that allows us to see something entirely new in familiar paintings and encourages our appreciation for the innovation and dynamism of the color grey.

Unrealism

Unrealism PDF Author:
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847862429
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Figurative painting of the past five years, represented here by an exciting young generation of artists and vital practitioners, addresses the challenge of contemporary representation through expressionistic compositions and new techniques reflecting digital fluency. Figuration is one of the oldest art forms, but it continually evolves, along with our changing understanding of human identity. The artists featured here often source imagery from the Internet, and draw on aesthetics developed in Internet-first channels. Digital techniques and affordances are incorporated into rendering processes with traditional media: brushstrokes are more precise, lines are sharper, and color is more highly keyed. In these works, expressionism is located more in the composition than in the paint handling. This richly illustrated collection of figurative works is accompanied by texts that connect the present moment in painting to the early 1980s, when the emergence of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel revitalized the art dialogue after the extended dissolution of Minimalism, and to its roots in the practice of painters like Picabia.