reviews CURACION GEOMETRICA
Cura Cion GeometriCa
ThE RElIANCE, lONdON
17 M Ay – 7 JUly
Curación Geométrica borrows its title from an image
extolling the benefits of looking at geometrical shapes
as a medical cure. Curated by the Reliance’s director
Emma Roberston, the show gathers 11 artists engaged
with the modernist vocabulary, from contemporary
Brazilian Lucia Koch to Bauhaus student and Black
Mountain College teacher Anni Albers. Most of
Albers’s career was spent experimenting with new
possibilities and materials for weaving, and the rich
texture and dynamic rhythm of her print on show at
the Reliance, Second Movement II (1978), bears the
marks of this research, showing modernist practice in
its first-generation form; Albers is set up as a mother
figure, one whose influence is both acknowledged
and rejected by the other artists.
Harry Smith’s film cosmogony of geometrical
forms Early Abstraction (1946–57) offers a first
digression from this modernist canon. The organic
movements of the abstract figures, as well as the
sensuality of their ever-changing colours, perverts,
even narcoticises the Bauhaus’s sober aesthetic.
In the second film on show, Smith projects onto this
first set of forms and colours an Ernstian mishmash
of esoteric symbols, including eyes, skeletons, horned
deities, tarot cards and Asian idols. Jacob Dahl
Jürgensen’s Brutalithic Constellation (2007) also links geometrical shapes and shamanism. Sara VanderBeek,
Rough-edged concrete blocks are laid out in a circle; one facet of each is covered in what
Drawing in Perspective, 2007,
digital c-print, 76 x 100 cm.
could be graffiti ripped off a slum wall, brutalist architectural debris transformed into a
Courtesy the Approach, london,
and d’Amelio Terras, New york
prehistorical Druidic arena. Frank Koolen’s large photograph Untitled (2005) presents two
garden chairs back-to-back, an assemblage completed with three lines of white tape on the
floor, which mirror the shape of the furniture and, together, create a Star of David pattern.
Smith’s kitsch iconography, Dahl Jürgensen’s urban fragments and Koolen’s minimal
intervention highlight the ‘unorthodox’ relationship between geometrical abstraction and
spirituality with an efficient understatement missing from the faux-didactic PowerPoint
animation of Falke Pisano’s A Lecture on Abstraction & Evil (2005–7).
Starting with a loosely formalist argument, and moving through the transmission and
détournement of visual heritage, Curación Geométrica could also be read as an interrogation
of the space between the two- and three-dimensional, and therefore the nature of the
sculptural object as a whole. Sara VanDerBeek’s photograph Drawing in Perspective (2007)
depicts a construction of metallic frames which variously enclose seminal images of art
history from Greek bronze to Nadar – a crash course of Western art’s ‘must-sees’ forced
into the rigid frame of geometrical abstraction. Giving precedence to the 2-D object – the
work only exists in this photographic form – VanDerBeek reappraises the hierarchy between
sculpture and photography. Similarly, Michael Hakimi builds his work by combining the
apparent opposites of flatness and spatiality. For The Three Dimensions (2007) he covers all
three planes of a corner of the exhibition space with newspaper and spray paint, replacing
Richard Serra’s lead with fragments of Britain’s national news. Here and in Armando
Andrade Tudela’s collapsing architectural model Light Sculpture (Sun and Portrait) (2007),
old modernist experiments are compellingly furthered using the trash of consumption
society. Coline Milliard
Artreview 120
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 6 7/8/07 15:42:23
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