ART-PRESENTATION: Concrete Matters, Part I
The term “Concrete Art” was coined in 1930 by Theo van Doesburg when he started the group Art Concrete in Paris. They were looking for a new formal idiom that was unfettered by figurative or abstract motifs. Instead, they aspired to create an autonomous reality using plane geometric shapes that they regarded as universal (Part II).
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
The Swiss artist, designer and architect Max Bill became one of the leading proponents of the concrete art movement. He organised the first international exhibition of Concrete Art in Basel in 1944 and also came to have a seminal influence on the development of the movement in Latin America through his contacts with Argentine artists such as: Tomás Maldonado and Juan Melé. A retrospective exhibition of Bill’s art in São Paulo in 1951 made a great impact on the Brazilian art scene. The concretists rejected the illusionism that artists had used over the centuries to create a three-dimensional pictorial space on the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Instead, they proposed that people should be surrounded by real things, not illusions. Concrete art was the path forward, since it ”Accustoms man to a direct relationship with things and not with the fiction of things”. The exhibition “Concrete Matters” features 80 works from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela and highlights the seminal period from the mid-1930s to the 1970s when Latin American artists were exploring the boundaries of Concretism, and of art itself. The period also presents the emerging Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement in the 1950s, which challenged the notion of the work of art as a static object. The artists featured in the exhibition are: Geraldo de Barros, Max Bill, Aluísio Carvão, Willys de Castro, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gego, Gyula Kosice, Judith Lauand, Raúl Lozza, Tomás Maldonado, Juan Melé, Juan Alberto Molenberg, Hélio Oiticica, Alejandro Otero, Lygia Pape, Rhod Rothfuss, Luíz Sacilotto, Mira Schendel, Ivan Serpa, Jésus Rafael Soto, Joaquín Torres-García, Rubem Valentim, Franz Weissmann and Anatol Władysław. Despite obvious visual similarities, the works in the exhibition reveal the occasionally contradictory ideas and intentions of these artists. In the four decades or more covered by this exhibition, artistic factions were being formed and reformed, spreading their occasionally utopian visions in essays, manifestoes, flyers, their own magazines, and the daily press.
Info: Curator: Matilda Olof-Ors, Moderna Museet, Exercisplan 4, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, duration 24/2-13/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-thu 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se
