December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
3h 39m
English
Art can be generated through engagement with a particular material.
In the late twentieth century, various artists made work whose central feature was the behavior of a medium or material. Thus, Morris Louis (1912–1962) made pictures in which he poured thin layers of paint onto large swaths of unprimed canvas. The resulting paintings are fundamentally demonstrations of how paint behaves, staining and spreading to create soft-edged veils.
Similarly, the gargantuan steel sculptures of Richard Serra (1939–) are dependent on the physical properties of steel. The properties of concrete are central to the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread (1963–), in which its capacities to pour, fill, and harden are used to render palpable interior ...