Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art

Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art was a serious exhibition held at Tate Modern, London, from 2 May to 14 October 2018. Surveying work from the 1910s to the current, it examined the connection between pictures and summary artwork. Tate introduced it as the primary main exhibition to discover that relationship throughout the 20 th century and past. The exhibition introduced collectively greater than 350 works by over 100 artists, displaying pictures alongside work, sculptures, and different objects.^[1][2]

The exhibition traced a historical past of abstraction in pictures by presenting pictures not as an remoted medium however as a observe that developed in dialogue with portray and sculpture. In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Tate director Frances Morris described its scope as extending from early experiments related to Cubism and Vorticism by the work of László Moholy-Nagy on the Bauhaus, the Surrealist pictures of Man Ray and Brassaï, and on to modern artists. The identical textual content emphasised the inclusion not solely of canonical twentieth-century figures but additionally of much less acquainted artists corresponding to Luo Bonian, working in Shanghai within the Nineteen Thirties, and Běla Kolářová, energetic in Prague within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies.^[3]

The exhibition was organised by Simon Baker, Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, Shoair Mavlian, and Sarah Allen.^[3] It additionally included a room dedicated to a reconsideration of The Sense of Abstraction, a 1960 exhibition on the Museum of Modern Art in New York. According to {the catalogue}, loans from the Jack Kirkland Collection accounted for nearly one third of the exhibition’s loans and fashioned a part of a considerable promised present to Tate.^[3]

According to {the catalogue} contents web page, the exhibition was organised round 4 chronological sections:^[4]

• In Search of a New Reality (1910–1940), by Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais
• Photography’s Sense of Abstraction (1940–1960), by Simon Baker
• Control, Order and Disorder (1960–1980), by Shoair Mavlian
• Surfaces and Impressions (1980–current), by Emma Lewis^[4]

Tate’s exhibition information described the central concern of the present because the historical past of abstraction in pictures by digicam and darkroom experiment, the manipulation of sunshine and supplies, repetition, corrosion, and re-photography.^[5]

The exhibition catalogue, Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, was printed by Tate Publishing in 2018. It was edited by Simon Baker and Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, with Shoair Mavlian, and included contributions by Sarah Allen, Emma Lewis, and the editors. Published together with the exhibition, it ran to 224 pages.^[6]

More than 100 artists took half within the exhibition.^[2][1] Artists represented included the next figures from Europe, the Americas, and East Asia.^[2][3][5]

Reviewing the exhibition for The Guardian, Sean O’Hagan described it as an “epic exhibition” and “an experimental masterclass”, praising the way in which it confirmed pictures shifting away from portraiture, panorama, and documentary towards abstraction by the manipulation of sunshine, chemical substances, and fragmented actuality.^[7] In distinction, Laura Cumming wrote in The Guardian that the exhibition did not outline photographic abstraction sharply sufficient and have become repetitive and overextended.^[8]

Writing in Felix, Fred S. Fyles singled out Kansuke Yamamoto’s The Thrilling Game Related to Photography as emblematic of the exhibition as a complete. He described it as a small boxed work that mixes {a photograph} of shards of glass with precise shards, and argued that it collapsed distinctions between sculpture, artwork, and pictures whereas retaining a pointy sense of play. Fyles additional advised that such works had been among the many exhibition’s most compelling options exactly as a result of they lay exterior the dominant photographic canon.^[9]