How the Grid Conquered Contemporary Art

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/how_the_grid_conquered_contemporary_art

 

 

 

 

Assignment 2 - Development of test piece

Assignment 2 - Experimentation

Various strips of recycled hessian arranged into an upward weave.

Assignment 2 - Experimentation

Deconstructed shirt fragments handstitched to hessian.
Gesso and acrylic paint.

First of all, the hessian's weave was overpowering and didn't function well as a background.  I quite liked the idea of the large stitches in this work. However, although the shirt industry was the original impetus for this assignment, I think it's too literal to use shirts themselves.

 

Assignment 2 - Experimentation

Deconstructed shirt fragments - 3 layers of progressively thick gesso
Support - old book cover

Manola Millares

 In looking at artists who either employ fabric, weave or stitch in combination with painting and other media, there was a plethora of these artists working in the post war era - 1950's and 1960's.  Following on from Rauschenberg, any material seems to have been subsumed into the artist's visual language.  Also, the canvas of the painted surface takes a battering as well.  Artists for the first time are assaulting the two dimensional plane of the canvas in different ways. One of these Artists was Manola Millares (Spanish) 1926 - 1972.

"Millares began making collages in 1954 using materials such as wood, fabric and sand. From the beginning his work was characterised by the rough textures of his materials and by his way of tearing, bunching, tying and stitching his materials together. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s he employed a particularly austere colour range to create images from which, although abstract, a human figure seemed to emerge. Millares called this figure the homunculus, a term that he associated with ‘man in a primitive state’."
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millares-painting-150-t00579

Salvatore Scarpitta