What's On | Mondrian Klint
We visited Tate Modern to see Hilma Af Klint and Pied Mondrian - Forms of Life, in our favourite art sneakers.
It has long been established that Tracey's love of Modernist Art is a great source of inspiration to her design process. The exploration of shape, colour and line underpins her creative practice, manifesting in graphic lines, circular discs, popping colour, and optimism. More recently, some of the shoes have even taken their names from favourite artists. Magritte, Escher, O'Keeffe and, of course, Mondrian.
Take a walk with us around the fantastic Tate exhibition that paired the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, with the Dutch Piet Mondrian. The exhibition focuses strongly on the spiritual investigation of both artists, and their individual quests to explore philosophy and higher states of consciousness through their work.
Piet Mondrian's Composition with Colour Planes, 1917.
Note how fresh the work looks today, 100 years after execution! Great art and design is timeless.
Hilma af Klint often employed the circle as a holistic spiritual form. Her works explored complex philosophical ideas, and her idiosyncratic abstraction was ahead of its time, yet, as a female artist she was inevitably passed over by Modern art history.
Lowtop Cherry, below, utilises the circle, as decorative, practical sculpture. New to the TN AW23 collection.
The stark contrast and use of space was a major breakthrough for Mondrian, who had started out painting still lives, landscapes, plants and flowers in an impressionist style. He was driven rapidly towards abstraction upon discovery of the Cubist movement, reducing recognisable forms from life into ever more simplistic compositional structures, and co-forming the De Stijl group, who, as they put it, found "expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour".
The group avoided symmetry and created balance in the use of oppositional imagery, and asymmetry, majorly influencing architecture and design, worldwide.
Piet Mondrian, with a perfectly matching outfit :)
An early Mondrian flower painting.
Mondrian Neutral - inspired by the painter's minimalist line work. The designer flat shoe has a crepe rubber sole, and is formed from butter-soft, Italian calf leather. A minimalist statement piece for the Tracey Neuls AW23 collection.
The use of pale colours and curved lines by af Klint elicits serene spiritual feeling, whilst the recurrent use of 'doubles' is a common trope of philosophy and psychology - 'the two parts of the whole' and has been used to reference the dualism of mind/body, positive/negative, the ego and its shadow. Interestingly, the artist chose not to show her abstract works during her lifetime, only her earlier naturalistic works. She wrote in her will that the later abstract works should not be made public until twenty years after her death - as she knew they would not be understood.
Ahead of her time indeed...
The exhibition has now ended, but catch us at the Art Car Boot Fair, September 16th, Kings Cross, where we will be offering these Geek Neon Red Sneakers at great prices - they are the perfect art expedition trainer.