Geometric Abstraction
Painting and sculpture that quit depicting anything and made color planes, straight lines and light the subject, sometimes pulling the viewer's retina or real motion into the work.
Dictionary entry
- De Stijl 1917–1931 / Style
Restricts the vocabulary to vertical, horizontal and primary color, building universal order from balance.
- Suprematism 1915–1920s / Style
Leaves depiction behind, raising felt tension from a few geometric forms and empty space.
- Op Art 1960s– / Style
Raises perceptual vibration and depth inside a still image through repeated line, form and value.
- Light and Space 1960s– / Style
The Southern California movement that takes light itself, spatial perception and the limits of vision as material. Turrell's openings to the sky and Irwin's scrims make the act of seeing the artwork.
- Orphism 1912–1914 / Style
An abstraction that returned colour and movement to Cubist fragmentation, painting light itself through rings of simultaneous contrast. Rotating discs and a refracted spectrum generate time and vibration within a static surface. One of the first practices to translate the theory of simultaneous colour contrast into form.
- Neo-Impressionism 1886–1900 / Style
A method that replaced Impressionist intuition with optical theory, setting down dots of unmixed pure colour to be blended on the retina. The discipline of Divisionism and Pointillism tackled, in advance, the same problems as later halftone printing, mosaic and pixel-based image construction.
- Kinetic Art 1950s–1970s / Style
Work defined by the condition that it actually moves, or that its image changes as the viewer moves. Mobiles, motor drives and layered grids producing moiré make time a structural element of the work. The foundation of the idea that motion itself is something to be designed.
- Neo-Geo 1984–1992 / Style
A 1980s New York current that re-quoted the vocabulary of geometric abstraction and Minimalism as signs of the commodity society. Smooth industrial paint, fluorescent colour and the gloss of ready-made goods slide abstraction's purity sideways into the imagery of consumption. Geometry as critique.
- Unism 1923–1936 / Style
A Polish theory holding that a picture should contain neither contrast nor centre, existing instead as a single homogeneous organism. The hierarchy of figure and ground is erased, and the colour surface continues with equal weight to the very edge. The theoretical ancestor of the uniform grid and all-over composition.
- Synchromism 1912–1918 / Style
The first abstract movement to originate in America, holding that colour itself could be structure on the analogy of musical harmony. Planes laid out in spectral order rotate and generate depth, and form follows colour rather than preceding it. The work titles, Synchromies or chords of colour, were the programme itself.
- Hard-Edge Painting 1959–1970s / Style
Painting that keeps every boundary perfectly sharp and builds the picture out of flat planes of colour alone. Brushwork and gradation are excluded, so the edge of a plane becomes the only event. The precise edge obtained by masking is the direct ancestor of later flat design and vector work.
- Concrete Art 1930s–1960s / Style
A movement constructing autonomous compositions only from line, plane, color, and proportion rather than abstracting nature or narrative. It suppresses chance and brushwork in favor of measurable relations and clear color fields across painting, print, object, and graphic design.
- Geometric Abstraction 1910s–present / Style
An abstract style composing with circles, rectangles, lines, grids, repetition, and proportion instead of depicting natural objects. It is an umbrella across De Stijl, Suprematism, Concrete Art, and Hard-Edge, united by geometry and clear boundaries rather than gesture.