Striped

About

Stripes are among the oldest ways to organise a surface. Weavers produce them simply by changing yarn colours, and striped textiles appear across cultures, from Ghanaian kente to Andean ponchos. Builders used them too: the black-and-white marble courses of Siena Cathedral and the red-and-white arches of the Great Mosque of Córdoba give walls a strong rhythm.

In the 20th century the stripe became a basic unit of abstraction. Morris Louis poured parallel rivulets of colour in his Unfurled paintings (1960–61), Gene Davis and Kenneth Noland painted hard-edged bands, and Bridget Riley's curving stripes of the 1960s make surfaces seem to ripple. Michel Parmentier created regular horizontal bands in the mid-1960s by folding canvas before painting it, and Daniel Buren places stripes of fixed width on walls, awnings and sails. Look at width, spacing and edge: taped and crisp, or soft and poured.