Fundacio Joan Miro - The exhibits, 3

Fundacio Joan Miro - The exhibits, 3

As always I am including the introduction from the first post. If you do not want to read it again, scroll down to the second picture after this.

We really enjoyed the time we spent in this wonderful museum. Even though it's a museum dedicated to the work of Joan Miro, many of the paintings are by another artist whose work has similarities with Miro's. An interesting way of presenting art, and one that I enjoyed enormously as it gave me an opportunity to find out about artists I did not know, or to see paintings I love once again. 

Joan Miro i Ferra, 1893-1983, a Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramicist. His work has been interpreted as Surrealism but with a personal style, sometimes also veering into Fauvism and Expressionism. He was interested in the subconscious mind, reflected in his re-creation of the childlike. His difficult-to-classify works also had a manifestation of Catalan pride.  In numerous interviews Miro expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society. He declared an 'assassination of painting' in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.

He combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy. His mature style evolved from the tension between his fanciful, poetic impulse and his vision of the harshness of modern life. He worked extensively in lithography and produced numerous murals, tapestries and sculptures for public spaces.

Though often referred to as a Surrealist, Miro considered his art to be free of any 'ism'. He experimented throughout his career with different media - painting, pastel, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, collage, muralism and tapestry - and unconventional materials as a way of making work that expressed the contemporary moment without relying on realism.

In this section, some of the most iconic artists of the 1950s are to be found. Combined with a tendency for a grand scale, the paintings of this period often enveloped the viewer by filling the visual field. Jackson Poollock was recognised as setting the pace. Elaine de Kooning wrote of this trend in 1949, as 'flying lines... spattered on in intense, unmixed colours to create wiry, sculptural constructions'. 

Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heart, 1946

Lee Krasner, Untitled [Little Image Painting], 1947-48

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1945-46

Elaine de Kooning, Untitled, 1950

Joan Miro, The Red Sun, 1948

Alfonso Ossorio, Number 14-1953, 1953

Michael Corinne West, Dagger of Light, 1951

Grace Hartigan, Six Square, 1951

Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1952-53

Jackson Pollock, Number 14, 1951





Lee Krasner, The Seasons, 1957.

One of my favourite paintings of all time. Although faced with extraordinary challenges, Lee Krasner made The Seasons in a burst of activity in 1957. She had been in Paris the previous summer when she received news that Jackson Pollock had died in a car crash. In mourning, Krasner helped mount the Pollock memorial show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and resumed her own painting in his now vacant studio. From that 'time of life and death', as she called it, this painting remains astonishing, with the physical effort of the bodily gesture matched by sweeping, productive forms. When included in Krasner's solo show in 1958, one reviewer recognised that 'the artist is directing her compositions, not just submitting to her materials'.

Franz Kline, Four Square, 1956

Robet Motherwell, Totemic Figure, 1958

Joan Miro, May 1968

By means of handprints and an explosive energy, May 1968 expressed Miro's alignment with the student protestors of that year. He also experimented further with pouring and working with the canvas flat on the floor.

Sam Francis, Blue, 1958

Sarah Grillo, Unfair, 1963

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Harvard Mural sketch), 1962

Joan Miro, The First Spark of Day II, 1966

Helen Frankenthaler, Canyon, 1965

Joan Miro, Self-Portrait, 1937-60


 

Opy Zouni - Geometric Abstraction

Geometric Attraction - Opy Zouni at the Theocharakis Foundation, Athens.

This is the second post on the Geometric Abstraction exhibition. The exhibition was on three floors and two and half of those were dedicated to the work of Opy Zouni so it felt right to do a separate post on her work. As usual, I will include the introduction from the first post - if you have read this already, jump to the next section which is right after the next picture.

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When Wassily Kandinsky painted his first abstract watercolour around 1910, the revolutionary upheaval that began in European art was as momentous as the introduction of perspective a few centuries earlier.

Throughout the 20th century, abstract art passed through many stages: it was questioned, attacked and rejected, then gradually achieved recognition and prominence. It became associated with artistic freedom, imagination, and the transcendence of visible, objective reality; with philosophical systems, scientific discoveries, mystical quests and political-social contexts; or it assumed cosmic and universal dimensions. At times, it served specific purposes, adopting multiple forms.

For a long time, women artists who turned to abstraction remained ignored, marginalised, or rendered 'invisible' within the male-dominated history of art, with few support networks available to them. A series of important exhibitions in recent years, from New York to London and Paris, have methodically and rigorously opened up, reassessed, and redefined the contribution of women artists to the history of abstraction. They present 'another' history countering one that frequently diminished or silenced the significant role women played in developing abstraction.

Zouni studied painting, pottery and photography in Cairo. In 1963 she moved to Athens where she studied at the School of Fine Arts - painting under Yannis Moralis, pottery and set design. She is known for her geometric and op-art style where she combines strict geometry with concepts of perspective and illusion. Her work explores the relationship between light, space and form, often carrying a poetic dimension. The main issue that has preoccupied her is the transition from two dimensions to three, the passage from a closed space to an open one. Through geometric shapes and bold colours, she captures light, shadow, motion and perspective.  The  immense spaces she creates seem even more immense due to human absence.

Roads in Reflection, 1972-1992, (acrylic on canvas)

White Room, 1989, (acrylic on cardboard and wood construction)

Chessboard Nature, 2002, (acrylic on canvas)

Climbing Towards Red, 1991, (acrylic on canvas)

Green Horizon, 1991, (acrylic on canvas)

Stairs in a Square Opening, 1990, (acrylic on canvas)

Stripes in Blue, 1984, (acrylic on canvas)

Cubes on a Chessboard, 2002, (acrylic on canvas)





Column, (acrylic on wooden construction)

Symmetrical Columns - Shadows, 1998, (acrylic on wooden construction)

We also watched a video where the artist talked about her work.

American Abstraction

American Abstraction at the Thysse- Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

It was such a pleasure seeing these paintings, particularly those of O'Keefe.

Georgia O'Keefe, Shell and Old Shingle, 1926, (oil on canvas)

In the early 1920s O'Keefe produced isolated images of simple shapes found in nature such as shells, bones and flowers, in reaction to the excessive intellectualisation and insularity to which painting was being subjected at the time. 'We were shingling the barn and the old shingles, taken off, were free to fly around. Absentmindedly I picked up a loose one and carried it into the house and up to the table in my room. On the table was a white clam shell brought from Maine in the spring. I had been painting it and it still lay there. The white shape of the shell and the grey shape of the weathered shingle were beautiful against the pale grey leaf of the faintly pink-lined pattern of the wallpaper. Adding the shingle got me painting again'.

Georgia O'Keefe, From the Plains II, 1954, (oil on canvas)

The vastness of the plains of Texas is imposing, heightened by the horizontal format of the canvas and by the flaming colours of the sunset. O'Keefe commented on this painting that 'the colour is just plain colour out of the tube - red and orange to lemon - it shocks me so that I'm rather struck with it - I don't know what it will get to'.

O'Keefe has simplified and enhanced the abstraction of the image in order to provide a visual equivalent of her memories. 'My first memory is of the brightness of light - light all around you', she said on one occasion. Her obssession with the light, which had moved her so greatly in Texas, led her to spend long periods away from New York from 1929 onwards in radiant New Mexico, and she settled permanently in the small village of Abiquiu in 1949. In these remote parts the luminosity of her paintings became even more transparent. She also used increasingly large formats to adapt to the imposing scale of the desert landscape.

Georgia O'Keefe, White Iris No. 7, 1957, (oil on canvas)

As in her other paintings of flowers, O'Keefe depicts the iris as if viewed from a close-up camera lens. Also derived from the photographic framing technique is the manner of cutting off the subject-matter at the edges, a device that further adds to the abstraction of her compositions.

Close-up views of flowers were a frequent theme in O'Keefe's artistic output. These images have very often been explained from a gender perspective and nearly always interpreted as having a sexual significance. The painter systematically rejected what she considered an erroneous interpretation, as evidenced by the text she published in the catalogue of the exhibition held in the New York gallery in 1939, in which she stated: 'Well - I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't'. Wonderful!

Jackson Pollock, Brown and Silver 1, 1951

Pollock, one of the foremost practitioners of Action Painting, began to work on his first drip paintings in 1947. From then on, he firmly espoused the idea of automatism, an automatism derived largely from Surrealism. 'When I'm in the painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing', he said. Furthermore, with the invention of the drip technique, he gave up easel painting and for the first time avoided any direct contact between the artist and the canvas: 'I continue to move further and further away from the painter's usual tools like easel, palettes, brushes and so on. I prefer sticks, spoons, knives, flowing paint that I drip or a thick paste with sand, ground glass and other unusual materials'.

He has applied the brown paint straight from the tin, using sticks and dry paintbrushes and has approached the composition from all four sides.

As the painting is not signed, it is not possible to ascertain its correct position.

Willem de Kooning, Abstraction, 1949-51

In this painting, De Kooning reveals a new conception of painting based on gesture and colour - an accomplished style of his own that is far removed from any previous modern language. Despite being titled Abstraction, this composition is based on traditional pictorial motifs, and is infused with figurative references.

The iconography of death, present in the skull in the lower right corner and the symbolic representation of Golgotha in the ladder and post to the right of the composition, contrasts with the unusually distorted and brutal pink and yellowish flesh tones. The force and mobility of the planes and figures result in a confusing image of life and death.

Abstract Erotic

'The works of all three artists sit close to the walls, hang from the walls, dangle on wires in front of them, or sit on shelves in a vitrine, jostling in and out of view, emphasising intimacy and proximity. It is a show of close relations, filled with delicate things and enigmatic things, and things as incomprehemsible as they are beguililng. It isn't about all forms directly analogous to body parts, although there are plenty of those. There is instead an unnerving slippage between the skin and the interior, between the whole and the part, just as there is between sculptural form and drawing, between object and image, threat and tenderness, familiarity and otherness.

... Gender in almost all the works here is slippery, when it can be ascribed at all'. 

(Adrian Searle, The Guardian, 19th of June, 2025).

Absstract Erotic at the Courtauld.

The term 'abstract erotic' was coined by the American critic and feminist curator Lucy Lippard to describe a new kind of sculpture emerging from artists 'studios in New York in the 1960s. This work was distinctive in its sensual approach to abstraction, evoking the body through organic forms and the use of surprising, often tactile and flexible materials. Lippard recalled:  'The work I was looking for was abstract and formally simple, with rough edges and erotic undertones'.

In 1966 Lippard curated a ground-breaking exhibition called Eccentric Abstration, which

embodied this new approach to sculpture, distinct from the rigorously geometric forms of abstraction prevalent in the art of the time. Lippard highlighted the unexpected materials on display, which, she said, produced a 'sensuous response' in the viewer 'even if they are not supposed to be touched'. The materials ranged from the handmade to the industrial, from simple paper mache, cord and wire to latex, plastic mesh, netting and chain-link fencing. Even the exhibition flyer, which she had specially produced on sheets of pinkish-brown vinyl, paid homage to the show's eccentric, erotic themes. Despite its small scale, Eccentric Abstraction went to to profoundly shape the language and legacy of post-war American sculpture.

This exhibition brings together the three women artists in Eccentric Abstraction: Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. Although they did not form a close-knit group, they knew each other through a shared friendship with Lippard, who published some of the earliest writing on their work. Lippard recognised something bold, humorous and erotic in their sculptures' use of unusual materials. Her inclusion of them in Eccentric Abstraction was an impressive curatorial feat during these years when women artists were not regularly shown in galleries or well known. Later reflecting on this, she would say: 'I can see now that I was looking for feminist art'.

All three artists experimented with materials in new and exciting ways, producing sculpture whose 'controlled voluptuousness' had 'a sensuous, offbeat abstraction', in the words of Lippard. Their sculpture deployed the monochrome palette of the minimalist art of the time, introducing to its austere forms a playful irregularity and bodily undertones.

If you want to see more work by Louise Bourgeois, go here , here , here , here 

To see more work by Eva Hesse, go here , here and here

Alice Adams, Threaded Drain Plate, 1964, (steel cable through perforated drain plate)

Louise Bourgeois, Tits, 1967, (plaster)

Alice Adams, Sheath, 1964, (cotton cord on cotton rope)

Eva Hesse, No Title, (ink, gouache, watercolour and graphite on paper)

This drawing combines precisely drawn and shaded forms that evoke bodily organs and mechanical objects. Hesse's drawing style became ever more pared down, as she wrote in a letter to her friend, the minimalist sculptor Sol Le Witt: 'drawings clean, clear but crazy like machines... it is weird they become real nonsense'.

Eva Hesse, Tomorrow's Apples (5 In White), 1965, (enamel, gouache, varnish, cord and paper mache on board)

Tomorrow's Apples (5 In White) belongs to an extraordinary group of 14 reliefs Hesse made. These reliefs were her first works in sculpture, constructed using discarded industrial materials aned objects from the factory. Hesse gave them all nonsensical titles.

Louise Bouegeois, Fillette (Sweeter Version), 1968-69, (pigmented urethane rubber)

The form Fillette (Sweeter Version) unmistakably recalls an erect penis yet its title, which means 'little girl' in French, suggests a more nuanced interpretation. This apparent contradiction is typical of Bourgeois' provocative sense of humour and delight in ambiguity. By hanging the sculpture from what looks like a hook, bourgeois wittily rejects the phallus as a symbol of power. She spoke about the phallus evoking feelings of 'tenderness' as well as 'vulnerability and protection, at one point even calling this work 'a little Louise'.

Alice Adams, Expanded Cylinder, 1970, (latex, cloth and foam rubber)

To make this work, Adams pressed chain-link fencing into a piece of foam, removing it and quickly setting the foam with latex before it had time to spring back and lose its shape. This careful transformation of a machined urban material into a soft-looking, fat grid is typical of Adams' sculptural process.

looking closer

Alice Adams, Pleated Sculpture, 1969, (latex over plastic mesh screening)

This delicate sculpture is made from plastic mesh, used in the construction industry, which Adams coated in liquid latex to hold its undulating or 'pleated' shape.

Adams sourced her materials from the hardware shops in Lower Mahattan, 'our supply store'. She also scoured the local lumberyard, which she said was 'sort of interesting to negotiate in those days when women customers were treated in this kind of desultory way, as if they didn't know what they were looking for. It was a little tense I guess you would call it'.

Alice Adams:

After graduating in Fine Art from Columbia University in 1953, Alice Adams spent a year in France where she learned to weave. Over the next decade she became a successful weaver and fibre artist, and around 1963 began making 'woven structures' in raw fibres. 

The following year, she abandoned textiles to sculpt in industrial metals such as rusted steel cable, tarred rope and chain-link fencing, which she scavenged from the streets or sourced in the hardware stores of lower Manhattan and transformed into imposing and surprisingly organic-looking sculptures. Adams felt these were comparable to fabrics in their ability to expand and compress. 'I find the correspondence between feelings about my own physiological make up and the feelings I have when working with flexible materials in an unfixed space... The tensions and compressions at play in the manipulation of cable, wire mesh, rubber, and cloth demand the same kind of adjustments people make in order to stand up and walk around every day. It's amazing'.

From the 1960s onwards Adams was concerned with expressing ideas about the body in her art, including in her large-scale public commissions of the following decades.

Resin Corner Pieces, 1967, (polyester resin mixed with white latex paint over corner wire lath sections)

Alongside bodies, Adams has always been interested in architecture and its underpinnings. This sculpture belongs to a group of works that feature prefabricated corners used in drywall construction. Their carefully individualised surfaces are, however, surprisingly tactile, almost skin-like.

'My work took a complete about face at this point and the eccentric forms... gave way to the 'corner' pieces, wall casts, and later stud-wall structures... I developed my own kind of minimalism...'

Big Aluminium 2, 1965, (aluminium chain-link fence)

22 Tangle, 1964-68, (rusted steel cable, fluorescent paint and aluminium chain-link fence)

This sculpture was first suspended from the ceiling of the Fischbach Gallery in Lucy Lippard's Eccentric Abstraction, its organic form exuding an 'eery' eroticism. Originally, another sculpture made of lighter-weight aluminium cable was place inside it. According to Adams, this idea was 'Lucy's mischief'.

In 1968, Adams created 22 Tangle by repurposing her sculpture Fluorescent Structure, which was originally placed on the floor underneath Big Aluminium 2.  To create the new work, the artist laboriously threaded the cables through a cylinder-shaped length of fencing whose links she had prised open and untwisted one by one. Critics at the time focused on her work's parallels with weaving.

Like much of Adams' sculpture in these years, 22 Tangle is a reborn industrial object: her response to the intense redevelopment of Manhatta in the 1950s and 1960s, she said, had made her 'feel physically injured'.

Eva Hesse:

Eva Hesse (1936-1970) was born in Hamburg, her family settling in New York in 1939 after fleeing Nazi Germany. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art from Yale University in 1959. Within a few years, Hesse would go on to invent a wholly new sculptural language comprising tangled, bound, weighted, suspended and netted forms. She manipulated her materials in unexpected and idiosyncratic ways, from papier mache and masking tape that she coiled and bound, to using fishing net and fiberglass. She created a body of work that has no parallel in the art of the time. When asked about her work's meaning, Hesse said:  'As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. It is something, it is nothing'.

In 1967 she began to experiment with making sculptures in latex, an unstable material that she knew would deteriorate over time. Her attitude was that art, like life, was absurd: 'Art doesn't last, life doesn't last'. She left behind an important body of work that would transform the way in which sculpture was made and understood. 'Absurdity is the key word', she said, and even her most spare, minimalist sculpture is characterised by bodily presence and playfulness.

No title, 1966, (nets, enamel, string, paper, metal and cord)

Untitled or Not Yet, 1966, (nets, polyethylene, paper, lead weights and cord)

Addendum, 1967, (papier mache, wood, cord)

'Endless repetition can be considered erotic', Hesse wrote in the year she made Addendum. For her, it was 'another way of repeating absurdity'.

In Addendum, meaning 'a thing to be added', Hesse deployed the serial attitude of minimalism but in unexpected and entirely original ways. This work is a major expression of Hesse's approach: a row of breast-like paper mache mounds are spaced at unequal intervals, with too-long cords hanging irregularly from them and coiling onto the floor - the effect at once elegant and absurd.

Louise Bourgeois:

Bourgeois was born in Paris, and moved to New York City in 1938, where she spent the rest of her life. In the mid-1940s, after two exhibitions of paintings, she developed a series of upright, carved wooden figures, which established her as a modernist sculptor. After an intense period of psychoanalysis in the 1950s, during which she made little art, Bourgeois began to create abstract forms in a range of soft and malleable materials such as latex, plaster, resin and wax. She described latex as a 'workshop discovery' and the change in her practice as a shift  'from rigidity to pliability'.

Bourgeois' work in latex gave new form to themes of female eroticism, desire and the unconscious that came to the fore in her work of the 1960s. By the 1970s, the feminist movement recognised her signal importance, claiming Bourgeois for their cause.

Rondeau For L, 1963, (plaster)

Named after Bourgeois' psychoanalst Dr Lowenfeld, Rondeau for L, with its roiling curves, suggests a tumultous emotional state captured in material form. A 'rondeau' is a style of poem with a repeating refrain. In psychoanalysis, patients return to the same issues as a means of working through them. Bourgeois considered her art in similar terms, as a means of expressing anxiety, desire and rage. 'The materials are my medium', she said. 'They are there to serve me. I'm not there to serve them'.

Portrait, 1963, (latex)

Portrait's knobbly surface looks buckled, as though an internal cavity has been turned inside out. Bourgeois would quickly learn that latex darkens and becomes brittle over time, yet works Like Portrait and Le Regard still retain a sense of softness in spite of these changes. Arguably, the ageing process heightens the fragile and experimental quality of these early latex sculptures.

Le Regard, 1963, (latex over fabric)

Le Regard, which means 'the gaze' in French, reflects Bourgeois deep engagement with theories of psychoanalysis. It explores the psychically charged relationship between unconscious desire, fear and repulsion. Bourgeois displayed this erotic yet abject sculpture at a tilt to reveal its glurinous interior. It was works like this that the feminist critic Lucy Lippard praised as at once 'astoundingly ugly and simultaneously appealing'.

Lair, 1962, (painted bronze)

Fee Couturiere, 1962, (painted bronze)

Hanging Janus, 1968, (bronze, dark and polished patina)