The exhibition Dimensions of Reality: Female Minimal, curated by Anke Kempkes and Pierre-Henri Foulon at Thaddeus Ropac Pantin, brings together fourteen women artists from Europe and the Americas, who each contributed in their original and uncompromising way to expanding the scope of the minimal aesthetics beyond the orthodox category of Minimal Art. Through a large selection of sculptures, installations, paintings and works on paper dating from the 1920s to the early 1980s, Dimensions of Reality: Female Minimal explores new perspectives and genealogies in the field of geometric abstraction, highlighting the complex and often subtle relationships between formalism and identity politics.
Female Minimal includes Liliane Lijn’s Poemkon=D=4=Open=Apollinaire (1968), an example of her pioneered work in the 1960s in Kinetic Art and Concrete poetry, which introduced elements of texts and numeric systems into abstract rotating sculptures.
Poemkon=D=4=Open=Apollinaire was originally commissioned for the 1968 exhibition Guillaume Apollinaire 1880-1918: A Celebration at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London).
Lijn used a simple numerological system to analyse Apollinaire’s name numerically and separate it into different words, ie: Apollo, in, air. From these other words came, and a ‘word-number poem’ developed in which each word related to a specific number.
At the time Lijn worked a great deal with numbers. All the proportions of the cones were carefully worked out and corresponded to the Pythagorian Golden rule, although she was not aware of the Fibonacci formula at the time and arrived at it by play and experiment.
The exhibition Female Minimal also includes works by Feliza Bursztyn, Rosemarie Castoro, Maria Lai, Verena Loewensberg, Mary Miss, Kazuko Miyamoto, Lucia Moholy, Vera Molnar, Marlow Moss, Lydia Okumura, Lolo Soldevilla, Magdalena Wiecek, Shizuko Yoshikawa.
23 February – 20 June 2020
More details about the exhibition here.
Galerie Thaddeus Ropac
69, avenue du Général Leclerc
92500 Pantin
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 7pm
https://www.ropac.net/
