Ornament
All of these affirm repetition and excess across a surface, reclaiming the act of decorating that modernism discarded, with cases from the Middle East, Portugal and the Pacific.
Dictionary entry
- Maximalism recurring / Style
Layers quantity, color and pattern without fear, making excess itself the richness.
- Victorian Ornament 1837–1901 / Style
Builds a thickly layered system of ornament from many revival styles and the riches of industrial printing.
- Stained Glass medieval–present / Technique
Divides light with colored glass and lead lines, making contour itself structure and story.
- Islamic Geometric Pattern 8th century– / Technique
Divides, repeats and combines circles, squares, polygons and stars, building infinite extension and order on a finite plane.
- Azulejo 15th century– / Style
Portugal's blue-and-white tile works as the skin of architecture, opening story, map and ornament onto the street until the city itself can be read as a printed plate.
- Kōwhaiwhai 18th century– / Style
Scroll patterns run along the rafters of Māori meeting houses. Built from the koru, the unfurling fern shoot, and worked in red, black and white alone, they unfold symmetry, rotation and reflection as a mathematics of curves that records genealogy and story overhead.
- Pattern and Decoration 1975–1985 / Style
A movement that argued head-on with modernism's premise that ornament is inferior. It brought the repetitions of Islamic geometry, quilts, wallpaper and textiles onto large canvases and placed women's handwork and non-Western idioms at the centre of art. The starting point for treating decoration as a political question.