CategoriesStyles and Movements
Concrete Art
Geometric abstraction built from planned lines, planes and colours that refer to nothing outside themselves.
26 works · 10 related artists
About
Concrete artists argued that a red square abstracts nothing: it is a real, concrete thing on the canvas. Theo van Doesburg set out the idea in a 1930 manifesto, and after his death the Swiss designer Max Bill became its leading advocate, treating a picture as the product of rules, systems and mathematical thinking rather than intuition.
In Zurich, Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Camille Graeser and Verena Loewensberg built pictures from modular grids, colour progressions and rotations. The approach found a vigorous second home in South America. In Buenos Aires in the 1940s, Tomás Maldonado's Arte Concreto-Invención and the Madí artists, among them Rhod Rothfuss with his irregular shaped frames, broke out of the rectangle. In São Paulo, Bill's sculpture prize at the first Bienal in 1951 encouraged the Ruptura group, including Luiz Sacilotto. Look for flat, unmodulated colour, hard edges and a composition whose logic can be worked out.
