Allover Composition
Compositions that spread evenly to every edge, with no central motif and no area given more weight than another.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
An allover picture treats every part of the surface alike. There is no main subject, no background and no obvious place for the eye to settle; the image could almost carry on past the stretcher. Jackson Pollock's poured canvases of 1947–50, such as Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950), are the classic case, and Clement Greenberg used the term in 1948 when writing about this kind of painting. Mark Tobey's 'white writing' and Lee Krasner's Little Image paintings of the late 1940s reached similar results by other means.
The approach has older relatives in textiles, Islamic tilework and the carpet pages of early medieval gospel books, where ornament fills a field edge to edge. Later painters took it in new directions: Alma Thomas built shimmering fields of dabbed colour in the 1960s and 70s, and Park Seo-Bo covered canvases with repeated pencil lines in his Ecriture series.
Related artists
More in Visual Qualities
Angular
Asymmetrical
Balance
Biomorphic
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Black and White
Blown-Off-Roof Perspective
Blurred
Bright and Vivid Colors
Bulbous
Calligraphic
Color Gradient
Columns and Totems
Contour Line
