Barbara Hepworth

From top to bottom: Three Forms (1935), Ball Plane and Hole (1936), Figure in a Landscape (1951-51), Curved Form (Trevalgan) (1956)

“I have always been interested in oval or ovoid shapes. The first carvings were simple realistic oval forms of the human head or of a bird. Gradually my interest grew in more abstract values – the weight, poise, and curvature of the ovoid as a basic form. The carving and piercing of such a form seems to open up an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension, changing in accordance with the contours of the original ovoid and with the degree of penetration of the material. Here is sufficient field for exploration to last a lifetime.

Before I can start carving the idea must be almost complete. I say ‘almost’ because the really important thing seems to be the sculptor’s ability to let his intuition guide him over the gap between conception and realization without compromising the integrity of the original idea; the point being that the material has vitality – it resists and makes demands.

I have gained very great inspiration from Cornish land- and sea-scape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one’s sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a greater whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is vitally important to me. I cannot feel it in a city.”

-Excerpted from Approach to Sculpture by the artist

Theo van Doesburg

From top to bottom: Still Life (1913), Design for the Central Hall of a University (1923), Maison Particuliere: Axonometric Drawing (1923), and Contra-Construction Project Axonometric (1923)

“Born Christian Emil Küpper in 1883 into an artistic family in Utrecht, he only became “Theo Doesburg” when he started painting – his adopted name being borrowed from his stepfather. The “van” was added later, in much the same way that Ludwig Mies added “van der” when he merged his mother’s maiden name, Rohe, with his own paternal surname. One detects a similar feeling of social insecurity in the two men.

At the start of his career Van Doesburg was a competent figurative painter, his work reminiscent of Van Gogh in early, potato-eater mode; but he soon came in contact with non-figurative painting and in 1916 met Mondrian, newly returned from Paris. The devotion of both men to the creation of a purely abstract art led to the formation of the De Stijl group in 1917 and the publication of its magazine, De Stijl, which Van Doesburg edited and published from its foundation that year until its demise following his early death in 1931.

Van Doesburg’s life may have been short but it was energetic. Throughout the 20s his saturnine features, often topped with a homburg and usually accompanied by a cigarette – think Humphrey Bogart – appear in photographs of divers artistic groups from Paris to Weimar, from Berlin to Zurich and Milan. Neo-plasticism, constructivism, suprematism, dadaism, elementarism – the “isms” of the time are bewildering to anybody but a specialist, but Van Doesburg was involved in all of them. Indeed he invented some. He was both gregarious and eclectic, a centripetal element in a diverse and chaotic artistic world. He lectured and published, talked and theorised, attended conferences and congresses and exhibitions, many of which he organised himself.

Of all the arts that Van Doesburg touched perhaps his greatest influence lay in the area of architecture and design. Together with the architects JJ Oud and Gerrit Rietveld, it was he who took the flat, geometric painting of the De Stijl group and burst it out into the third dimension. Indeed he even tried to inform his work with a fourth dimension, although with what success is a matter of debate. Certainly he was fired with a thrilling spatial imagination. His axonometric projections of ideal houses, created in conjunction with the young architect Cornelis van Eesteren, are crucial in understanding this concept so it is a shame that they do not form part of this otherwise comprehensive exhibition. A plastic model of one of the proposed buildings (the “Maison Particulière”) gives some idea but a 3-D model is not as striking as the original drawings. A model is too literal. In the drawings perspective is ambiguous; walls are no longer supporting structures but floating, intersecting planes of primary colour; rooms are not static boxes but conceptual spaces hovering in the air. The volumes of the buildings seem to explode from an ­inner core, as though erupting into the third dimension and straining for that elusive fourth.”

-Simon Mawer for The Guardian

James Abbott McNeil Whistler

From Top to Bottom: Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Southampton Water (1872), Nocturne (1875-1880), Nocturn in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket (1875), Nocturne (1878)

“Whistler’s aim in these works was to convey a sense of the beauty and tranquility of the Thames by night. It was Frederick Leyland who first used the name ‘nocturne’ to describe these moonlit scenes, suggesting the concept of evening, or night, but with musical associations. The expression was quickly adopted by Whistler, who later explained,

‘By using the word ‘nocturne’ I wished to indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. A nocturne is an arrangement of line, form and colour first.’

Whistler preferred the calm of the river at night to the noise and bustle of the Thames by day. With the Greaves brothers as his oarsmen, he would set off at twilight and sometimes remain on the river all night, sketching and memorising the scene. He never painted his Nocturnes on the spot, but rather from memory in his studio, employing a special medium devised for painting swiftly in oils. He thinned his paint with copal, turpentine and linseed oil, creating what he called a ‘sauce’, which he applied in thin, transparent layers, wiping it away until he was satisfied.”

-Frances Fowle for The Tate Britain

Odilon Redon

From Top: The Rocky Slope (c. 1875), Trees in the Blue Sky (c. 1883), Apache (Man on Horseback) (c. 1875), Large Bouquet in a Blue Vase (after 1912)

“Born Bertrand-Jean Redon, this French painter, printmaker, and draftsman spent his childhood at Peyrelebade, his father’s estate in the Médoc. Peyrelebade became a basic source of inspiration for all his art, providing him with both subjects from nature and a stimulus for his fantasies, and Redon returned there constantly until its enforced sale in 1897. He received his education in Bordeaux from 1851, rapidly showing talent in many art forms: he studied drawing with Stanislas Gorin (?1824–?1874) from 1855; in 1857 he attempted unsuccessfully to become an architect; and he also became an accomplished violinist. He developed a keen interest in contemporary literature, partly through the influence of Armand Clavaud, a botanist and thinker who became his friend and intellectual mentor.

Redon’s vocation was still undecided in 1864 when he studied painting briefly and disastrously at the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris. He returned to Bordeaux, and his commitment to the visual arts was strengthened by his friendship with Rodolphe Bresdin, whose drawings and prints he much admired. He learnt from Bresdin’s skills as an engraver and made etchings under his guidance. In 1868 and 1869 Redon published his first writings: a review of the 1868 Paris Salon and an article on Bresdin, both in the Bordeaux newspaper La Gironde. His criticism looked back to the provincial artistic values of his background but also forward to an art of the future that would advocate imagination rather than pursuing realism. Such views reflected his wider loyalties: to Rembrandt and Corot, and especially to Delacroix. These early developments matured into an active artistic career only after the Franco-Prussian War, in which Redon served as a soldier. He regarded this experience as the catalyst that finally produced in him a firm sense of vocation. He settled in Paris for the first time, spending only his summers at Peyrelebade, and he began to participate in Parisian artistic and intellectual life. He was by then producing large numbers of highly original charcoal drawings, which he called his Noirs. They evoke a mysterious world of subjective, often melancholic fantasy. In 1879, partly at the suggestion of Fantin-Latour, he published his first album of lithographs, Dans le rêve.

Redon’s reputation until 1890 rested entirely on work in black and white, but he had been using colour in unexhibited landscape studies. From about 1890 he began to extend his use of colour to works that repeat or develop the subject-matter of the Noirs. Many of these were oils, such as Closed Eyes (1890; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay), but pastels also became frequent (e.g. Christ in Silence, c. 1895; Paris, Petit Pal.). During the 1890s he used colour alongside monochrome, colour gradually becoming dominant, and after 1900 he abandoned the Noirs. Earlier subject-matter recurred, but new motifs also appeared, flowers, especially, becoming a central preoccupation. The increasingly decorative tone of these works led to commissions for screens and murals, an outstanding example being the paintings (1910–11) on the walls of the library at Fontfroide Abbey near Narbonne. The serene lyricism of these late colour works contrasts with the prevailing melancholy of the Noirs, but Redon’s fundamental aesthetic had not altered. The transformation of nature into dream-like images, suggesting indefinite states of mind and expressed in sumptuous textures, remained his central concern, and the exploratory freedom with which he investigated the suggestive potential of colour contributed considerably to Post-Impressionist art. His innovations were admired by the Nabis and by some of the Fauves, including Matisse.”

-Richard Hobbs for Oxford University Press, Grove Art Online

John Henry Twachtman

From Top to Bottom: Arques-la-Bataille (1885), Round Hill Road (ca. 1890-1900), Flowers (ca. 1900), and Along the River, Winter (1889)

“Born in Cincinnati, John Henry Twachtman worked as a decorator of window shades, as had his father. At the same time he took night classes at the Ohio Mechanics Institute and then enrolled at the McMicken School of Design (which later became the Art Academy of Cincinnati), where Twachtman studied with Frank Duveneck. Duveneck was a recognized painter who had recently returned from Munich, and he urged Twachtman to go to Munich to attend the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In 1875 Twachtman went to Munich, and during his European stay he accompanied Duveneck and his fellow Munich colleague, William M. Chase, on a painting trip to Venice. Returning to the United States in 1878, Twachtman exhibited with the newly formed Society of American Artists in New York; he was elected a member the following year. In 1879 Twachtman met and began a lifelong friendship with J. Alden Weir. In 1881, he made a wedding trip to Europe, joining Weir and his brother John on a painting expedition to Holland and Belgium.

Between 1883 and 1885 Twachtman studied, traveled, and worked in France, meeting other American Impressionists Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, andTheodore Robinson in Paris. In 1889 Twachtman began teaching at the Art Students League, and, with the profits from a cyclorama he had painted withArthur B. Davies in Chicago, he purchased a home in Connecticut near Weir’s farm.

Twachtman’s naturalism combines the earth tones and the fluid brushwork of Duveneck and the Munich school, the muted harmonies and abstract patterning of Whistler, and, the atmospheric effects of Claude Monet. Writing in A Collection in the Making, Duncan Phillips noted that ‘Twachtman’s was perhaps the finest sensibility in American art.’

Among his many awards, Twachtman received a silver medal at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and a gold medal at the 1894 Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts annual exhibition. In 1897 he and Weir withdrew from the Society of American Artists and formed The Ten American Painters. Estranged from his family, Twachtman spent the summers of 1900 and 1901 in Gloucester, where he died suddenly on August 8, 1902.”

-American Art at The Phillips Collection

Nicholas O’Brien

Work from his oeuvre.

Short texts for each project follow – but the projects presented here are three of O’Brien’s interpretations on the function and legacy of the landscape.

“Farms at the End of Winter – This short animation is inspired by looking out the window during lengthy bus trips I made between Cincinnati and Chicago.

The Wanderer – This video game work explores the relationship between Romanticism and contemporary digital art. You play as the ghost of Romanticism’s past, drifting through a purgatory built from notable paintings by Caspar David Friedrick.

Three Ways of Evaluating Landscape as a Work of Art – This video looks at landscape in three different ways: silently, narrated, and loudly.” – Nicholas O’Brien

Kim Laughton

Work from his oeuvre 

“Some extraordinary 3D design here from Shanghai-based artist Kim Laughton. Kim consider himself a little impatient because he usually don’t like anything that isn’t finished in a day or two. You may recognize his work from some of Kingdom‘s visuals or from TIMEFLY(his personal clothing label). TIMEFLY is where Kim puts most of his energy, where he can enjoy the sense of collaborating with the artists who produce designs to go on the clothes through the renders, even if the collaboration is very one sided. There are some exciting new artists lined up for TIMEFLY, giving a lot of potential to play with the whole thing.” – O Fluxo

Nick Bastis

Work from The World’s Largest Pistachio

“A room built inside a room, posited as a sculpture. The room can be entered and also circumnavigated through narrow alleys. A three channel video presents text and images, also acting as a script for performances or “readings” that occurred at times during the exhibition. Large windows are cut in both the newly built room as well as the existing gallery wall, revealing a large 200 sq. ft. unused space behind it. The piece of drywall removed from sculpture’s wall is hung as a blue painting, the color that the back of the wall had been painted. The speaker is hooked up to a drum machine behind the security desk with which they report their already occurring body counts of the occupants of the room.” –Nick Bastis

Rachel De Joode

Work from Various Qualities To Orbit The Mysterious Core

“Installation of a group of eight photographic sculptures.
The pedestals are printed, rather than produced as volumetric shapes, and the sculptures that sit on them are no thicker than the wood they are mounted to.

The sculptures are photographs of sculptures resting on pedestals; the original sculptures consist out of print out (cut-out) photographs; of partly manipulated fingers and hands that are molding clay. Other materials include: fake wood, real wood, terra cotta clay and pottery pieces, plastic terra cotta pieces, dough, plasticine, puff pastry, water, paint, glue, pigment, cement….

Measurements vary between 30 cm to 45 cm in width and 130 cm to 150 cm in height. The complete installation is about two meter in width, three meter long and one and a half meter in hight.

Materials: stick, rubber, fine art print mounted on laminated plywood (cut out by hand).” –Rachel De Joode