Wide-ranging, compelling and thought-provoking, this exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (til 6 April 2015) takes Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ as a starting point for a whistle-stop tour of abstract art’s exploration of geometric abstraction. It uses works (mostly print and photography but also publications, film and sculpture) from 100 artists from around the world to create a timeline of development for abstract ideas and traces their influence on the wider world, particularly graphic design.
The show is perfect as an introduction to the different types of experimentation which occurred from the late 19th century through to the present day, and I came away with a clutch of names to research further.
I was particularly struck by the interplay between photography and print: the way the exhibition drew parallels between the pared-down composition of pictures being taken of industrial and urban shapes (see Thomas Farkas, Lewis Baltz, Facundo de Zuviria and Werner Mantz), and the simple, neutral new approaches to graphic design and publications which aimed to remove the designer’s personality from the work in order to focus on the message being communicated (El Lissitzky, Nasreen Mohamedi). The striking Dora Maurer’s ’Seven rotations’ – a version of a photo, of a photo, each taken on top of the other, is another very simple but very powerful idea.
I’m very interested in the idea of using the familiar shapes and textures of urban life to inform design work and provide a communications framework and will look at this further during the course.
hannahbailey.org 