In the early twentieth century, a profound change occurred in painting: artists no longer sought to represent the visible world, but instead embraced a new, universal pictorial language that reduced artistic expression to the interaction of colors, lines, and forms. In Europe and the United States, this radically modern approach gave rise to multifaceted currents of geometric abstraction that tested the limits of painting—from Suprematism and Constructivism, to the Bauhaus and British postwar abstraction, to Hard Edge painting and Op Art.
Kandinsky’s Universe: Geometric Abstraction in the 20th Century is the first exhibition in Europe to tell the story of geometric abstraction not by presenting a series of national movements, but by tracing the lines of connection between them. Twelve works by Wassily Kandinsky—a key figure in abstraction who influenced generations of artists with theoretical writings such as Point and Line to Plane—serve as a thread running through the exhibition.
Kandinsky’s Universe clearly shows how fearless, how radically modern geometric abstraction was at the time—in obvious contradiction to the accusation sometimes leveled against it, that it was cold or ‘lacking in content.’
Ortrud Westheider, Director of the Museum Barberini
A total of 125 paintings, sculptures, and installations by seventy artists show how geometric abstraction challenged the imagination of viewers again and again. The artists represented include Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Barbara Hepworth, El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, and Victor Vasarely.
Loans for the show come from the Courtauld Gallery, London, the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæek (Denmark), the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. The exhibition also includes works from important American collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as well as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
© Text courtesy of Museum Barberini
