The London Group. Research.

The London Group was set up in 1913 by thirty two artists including Robert Bevan, Henri Gaudier Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Lucien Pissarro and Walter Sickert, with the aim of creating a powerful artist-run group to act as a counter-balance to institutions such as the Royal Academy. The founding group created a unique structure for an organisation, that has gone on to successfully nurture the careers of many of Britain’s best-known artists.

The London Group Today

The London Group is a thriving democratic artists' collective practicing in all disciplines, from painting and sculpture to moving image, digital and performance, with a full annual events programme in London and beyond.

The Group’s written constitution requires it "to advance public awareness of contemporary visual art by holding exhibitions annually." Operating in the interstices between existing art institutions, the Group’s focus today is on self-generated exhibitions. Curated and managed by its artist members, these events aim to offer a serious and alternative perspective to contemporary visual arts in Britain.

Minimalism. Research.

In the early 1960’s when the Minimalist movement gained momentum as they felt that abstract expressionism was too personal, pretentious and insubstantial. They rejected the idea that art work should reflect the artists own, personal emotions and therefore the minimalists adopted the point of view that a work of art should not refer to anything but itself. Their goal was to create work that was totally objective, inexpressive and non-referential. During the rise of minimalism there was one painter specifically affiliated with the movement, former abstract expressionist Frank Stella. Stella acclaimed the minimalist persona instantly with his Black Paintings (1958-60) the paintings consisted of a regular canvas painted black with thin pin stripes of canvas left in between strokes, the paintings contrasted the emotional canvases of the abstract expressionists. There were also two prominent theorists, Donald Judd and Robert Morris, Judd wrote the minimalist manifesto-like essay “specific objects” in 1964.

The minimalists wanted to allow the viewer an instant, purely visual response and let them experience even more strongly the main characteristics and qualities of the art work which focused around colour, form, space and material. Minimalist artists sought out to deconstruct the foundations of other Western art movements to reveal the fundamental character: the medium and materials of the work were its reality rather than personal expression. The concepts portrayed were purely aesthetic and at the time, revolutionary. 

In order to achieve their ambition and fulfil the minimalist manifesto, they attempted to remove all suggestion of self-expression from the art work in which they did in many ways; composition, complexity of form, themes, social comment, elements of traditional works and any other form of self-expression by the artist.

              From then on, all choices stem from the intention of giving the work a literal presence:

·         Use of unitary, geometric forms, as these could be mistaken neither for representations of the external world nor for the narrative of a story.

·         Use of monochromatic palettes of the primary colours, as these are the most basic and thus neutral of colours. Colour was not used to express feeling or mood, but it simply to delineate space (source)

·         Use of plain, industrial, factory-made or store-bought, mass-produced materials, as these underscored the absence of the artist’s individual ‘mark’. These modern materials also defy the traditional artistic materials. Materials were left raw or unaltered and were not intended to symbolize anything else.

Neo-Concrete movement. Research.

During the twentieth century many artists sought out to pioneer a new genre succeeding the geometric forms made abundant by the likes of Picasso and George Braque. In the decades following, various movements sprung out of Cubism from the motion-focused compositions of fascist Futurists to the primary colour rectangles of De Stijl. By the late 1930’s a style emphasising extreme flatness, rational forms and a distancing from reality emerged that was known as Concrete art. Concrete art was practised in many regions but becoming especially popular in Brazil. Some artists found the practical, almost mathematical approach dissatisfying and sought to find an alternative.

In Brazil in the late 1950’s a group of artists led by Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark founded the Neo-Concrete movement. These artists sought to combine the structured approach of Minimalism and Constructivist styles with a deeper communication on feeling.

Their manifesto (penned by poet Ferreira Gullar) speaks out against “the kind of concrete art that is influenced by a dangerously acute rationalism” and encourages concrete art to be “re-evaluated with reference to their power of expression rather than to the theories on which they based their art.” These artists felt their movement was “born out of the need to express the complex reality of modern humanity inside the structural language of a new plasticity,”,

focusing on personal expression and thus contrary to the scientific and positivist ideas consuming much of western art at the time. 

Artist Research.

Iwao Yamawaki.

Born 1898 in Nagasaki, Iwao Yamawaki was a Japanese photographer and architect who trained at the Bauhaus in the early 1930's. He was an interesting figure at the intersection of modernism and the history of Japanese photography. Strongly influenced by Laszio Moholy-Nagy and Walter Peterhans (teachers at the Bauhaus), his architecture photographs and photo montages demonstrate a close relationship between design and space. He continuously tried to interpret the connection between humans and an architectural space.

His work resonates with me, although they differ in motif we both try to establish a connection between human interaction and something which is essentially froze in time. My landscape and architectural photographs focus on the contrast between two entirely different views. His use of only black and white photographs also have a distinct message, his images look cold and unwelcoming but also taking nothing away from the structure depicted, 

Lucia Maholy

The portrait and architectural photography as well as the photos of objects that Lucia Moholy (1894–1989) created at the Bauhaus have made her one of the most renowned female photographers of the early 20th century. 

Her work surrounds several subjects within photography from architectural photographs of the Bauhaus building and freelance photpgraphy to still lifes and portraits. Working around the same time as Iwao Yamakwaki and adopting a similar style of producing her work.

Artist Research.

Carmen Herrera

Core to Carmen Herrera’s painting is a drive for formal simplicity and a striking sense of colour. A master of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, Herrera creates symmetry, asymmetry and an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension across the canvas with the most unobtrusive application of paint. As she moved towards pure, geometric abstraction in the post-war years in Paris, she exhibited alongside Theo van Doesburg, Max Bill and Piet Mondrian and a younger generation of Latin American artists, such as members of the Venezuelan Los Disidentes, Brazilian Concretists and the Argentinian Grupo Madi.

Herrera's simplicity and use of the formal elements within her work have been influential in adapting my own work, I have taken her use of colour and geometric abstraction along with her use of crisp lines and incorporated them into my own prints by deconstructing my landscape photography.

Ivon Hitchens

Ivon Hitchens was a British painter best known for his abstract, panoramic depictions of woodland landscapes near his home in West Sussex. His works utilise abbreviated fields of colour perceived from a landscape rather than exact forms. Born on March 3, 1893 in London, England, Hitchens went on to study at the Royal Academy of Art and became a part of the London Group of artists, which also included Leon Kossoff. Hitchens then moved out to the countryside after his London studio was bombed during World War II, and he would live out of a caravan and paint his surroundings for the remainder of his life. His work was exhibited at the British Pavilion in the 1956 Venice Biennale, and today, his paintings are in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the Courtauld Institute in London, among others.

HItchen's paintings are welcoming and exciting in the way they are painted, the loose, rash and abstract brush strokes visible create a vision of the landscape depicted. The use of block colour rather that detail encouraged me to try and adapt my own painting style and create much looser paintings of my own.

Artist Research.

Gordon Matta-Clark.

Born in New York in 1943, Gordon Matta-Clark is widely considered one of the most influential artists working in the 1970s. He was a key contributor to the activity and growth of the New York art world in SoHo from the late 1960s until his untimely death in 1978. His practice introduced new and radical modes of physically exploring and subverting urban architecture, and some of his most well-known projects involved laboriously cutting holes into floors of abandoned buildings or, as with Splitting (1974), slicing a suburban villa in two.

One of my favourite and most interesting of Matta-Clark's works is Bingo created in 1974 which consists of building fragments, plaster, wood and glass. To create Bingo, Gordon Matta-Clark cut pieces from the facade of a house in Niagara Falls, New York, that was slated for demolition. It took a team of assistants 10 days to “unbuild” the house. Working 12 hours per day with a small team, he cut the north facade into nine equivalent rectangles (each nine feet wide and five feet tall), and then removed each one until only the central rectangle remained. Matta-Clark kept the three sections of the building pictured here, and deposited the remaining five in a nearby sculpture park, where he hoped they would be “gradually reclaimed by the Niagara River Gorge.

A House of (Bingo) Cards
The artist called this work Bingo because the facade, when cut into nine pieces, resembled the grid of a Bingo game card. In his complete vision for the project, Matta-Clark hoped to cut out the central panel of the opposite facade and leave the rest intact, to create a negative, or opposite, of this facade, but there was not enough time. He explained in his film The Making of “Bingo” that “an hour later, the bulldozer arrived.”¹

Deconstructing Construction
Matta-Clark said, “By un-doing a building there are many aspects of the social condition against which I am gesturing: to open a state of enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for insuring a passive, isolated consumer—a virtually captive audience…Under contract with the city I was to complete the work in ten days, during which time a major part of the exterior was to be sectioned into 9 equal parts, measuring 5’ x 9’. Eight of the façade segments were cut free, lowered intact, and crated for transport.”

(referenced from www.moma.org/gordon_matta-clark) 

Artist Research.

Lygia Pape

Initially inspired by the formal geometric abstraction of Concrete art, which emerged in Brazil in the early 1950s, Pape started out by making geometric constructions. She later tired of the severity of this prescriptive art form and moved beyond its constraints, becoming a founding member of the Neo-Concrete movement dedicated to the inclusion of art into everyday life. Pape broke away from preconceived artistic categories, and from the 1960s onward sought to inject new expressive formulae into abstract art. Challenging formal and conceptual boundaries and becoming a pioneer of Brazilian contemporary art. Claiming, “art is my way of understanding the world,” she worked in painting, printmaking, sculpture, dance, film, performance, and installation, always attempting to merge art and life.

Her prints and paintings combine the use of bold line and blocked colour in geometric shapes to create the abstract form and movement across her work, she takes this style into her sculptural work also creating large abstract geometric shape using colour to differentiate the forms. Through looking at Pape's work it has helped me distinguish a style within my own work in which i have taken forward within my own prints and paintings. The considered yet expressive use of shape and colour is something that i have used to experiment with, 

Tecelar, 1955

Helio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) was one of the most innovative Brazilian artists of the twentieth century and is now recognised as a highly significant figure in the development of contemporary art. Oiticica produced an outstanding body of work, which had its origins in the legacy of European Modernism as it developed in Brazil in the 1950s. But his unique and radical investigations led Oiticica to develop his artistic production in ever more inventive directions.

Through his work he was to challenge the traditional boundaries of art, and its relationship with life, and to undermine the separation of the art-object from the viewer, whom he turned into an active participant. Among Oiticica’s most original achievements was his inventive and uncompromising use of colour.

His unique style of using colour and shape harmoniously have made me consider how to depict my landscape photographs and drawings. Through researching his work i have taken a new approach in using abstract form and colour to represent a landscape.