Curatorial Statement
Geometry’s mathematical foundation provides a false sense of certainty in its ability to measure the world we know and recreate with precision three dimensional objects and spaces on a two dimensional plane. As there is much that we can’t see, understand, or know, and even more to be intuited and imagined, artists have long approached geometry less as a set of rules than a lens to be explored.
From the tiled constellations of 6th century Islamic architecture, where repeating forms are thought conjure spiritual connection and provide a greater understanding of reality, to the Renaissance conviction that the world could be ordered through mathematical logics—articulated by Leon Battista Alberti’s treatises on art, architecture, and perspective and embodied in works such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—geometry has served as a bridge between vision and structure in an attempt at understanding the physical world. Modernism initiated a more intuitive and investigative use of geometry. The bold graphic designs of Russian Constructivism aimed to reflect industrial society and the built environment; the meditative compositions of Joseph Albers and Agnes Martin employed grids, planes, and color to express not only an external environment but an internal, emotional experience; and the seriality of Minimalism’s art objects sought to make viewers more attuned to their phenomenological relationships with space. These varied approaches suggest that shape is not a fixed system but a tool and a language that can articulate mathematical principles as much as it can convey ideas, emotions, and experiences.
Geometry: The Shape of Things gathers artists who engage this lineage not as prescriptive but as generative—a method by which to comment on art history, better understand the world, and imagine new relationships to space and perception.
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