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Turning the Tables with Geometric Art: How it Became the Ultimate Rule-breaker
- Sutithi
- Mar 11
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 12
With Cubism, art and geometry bonded radically. From the twentieth century, geometric art started to change forms from structural to expressive. The urge was to define a transitional world between wars and rapid industrialization through fragmented patterns. Artists counted on the primitive shapes, like circles, rectangles, and squares, to define art. George Braque and Pablo Picasso, the phenomenal Avant-garde artists, introduced fragmented planes and multiple viewpoints in the early 1900s. They reduced objects to basic geometry art, like cubes, cones, and cylinders, seen from angular perspectives.
What is Angular Abstraction and ‘Bizarreries Cubiques'?
The magic of Cubism was that everyday objects were deconstructed as geometric shapes. The term ‘bizarreries cubiques’ addressed this fragmentation, which was later translated into 'cubist oddities.'
At times, it was difficult to make out the paintings made by Picasso or Braque, as they used a similar geometric abstraction, like in two paintings called Ma Jolie by Picasso and The Portuguese by Braque.
What Marked the Transition from Realism to Geometric Abstract Art?
Cubist artists focused on the pure visual elements in art, like the lines, shapes, colors, etc., and the inherent mathematics in them. It was quite a bold transition from the representation of the physical world to linear constructions, in search of a new order and balance.
While breaking every object into geometric form, these two artists find a unique principle of angular abstraction, highlighting sharp angles and sharp lines. Those are unlike the organic shapes found in nature. Picasso and Braque broke down the pictorial elements into triangles, cones, rectangles, polygons, and intersection lines. As a result, an unusual harmony was created.
De Stijl (The Style) Movement & Pure Abstraction
Cubism began to inspire 20th-century artists like Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, who pushed the boundary of mathematical abstraction further towards pure geometric abstraction. Malevich called it zero-degree art or Suprematism (the art of nothingness). They no longer represented verbatim reality but worked on expressing universal rhythm and harmony through these geometrically fragmented shapes.
Before the Dutch movement De Stijl (the style) concentrated on pure abstraction in art, Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian had already started exploring the somewhat gray areas of near-abstraction. Unlike pure abstraction, where there is hardly any reference to natural objects, Piet Mondrian started with natural objects but gradually drew apart from them in his geometric painting. The word ‘abstraction’ also means to pull away.
Piet Mondrian and Geometric Abstract Art
“The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore, the object must be eliminated from the picture.”
—Piet Mondrian
Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg felt that aesthetic urge of eliminating natural objects from the context and concentrated on pure form and hues, like the use of primary grids and colors (red, blue, and yellow), including shades of black and white. Mondrian reduced shapes into vertical & horizontal lines and various geometric shapes that would reveal a deep spiritual harmony and clarity beyond physical reality.
No wonder the De Stijl (the style) movement added philosophical depth and purity to the mathematical abstractions to discover the true essence of each object portrayed.
Geometric Art and the Bauhaus School of Design
When we discuss geometric patterns in art and transcending the traditional realm of representation, how can we leave out artists like Kandinsky or Paul Klee? Talents like Wassily Kandinsky emerged from the German Art School ‘Bauhaus’ of the early 20th century, which practiced art and craft along with mathematical design logic.
Wassily Kandinsky and the Geometry of Emotions
In the Bauhaus School, more emphasis was given to industrial aesthetics and rudimentary geometric forms and shapes like rectangles, squares, and spheres, without any elaborate designs. The idea was to follow a functional geometry through basic patterns and modular grids.
The motto behind the foundation of Bauhaus was quite innovative, combining architecture, craftsmanship, and fine arts seamlessly to eradicate the social barrier between an artist and a craftsman.
Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian painter and one of the prominent names associated with the Bauhaus School, linked emotions with shapes, colors with sound, and geometric abstract artwork with spirituality. With him, circles, squares, and triangles got their new psychological meaning. Kandinsky’s paintings were large-scale, abstract masses, expressed with vibrant colors, forms, and lines. He found a kind of musical rhythm in his geometric abstract artworks, as he believed music is abstract by nature, which refers to no physical objects but evokes internal feelings.
Optical Art (Op Art): Geometry in Motion
Optical Art, or Op Art, is a new science of visual perception that uses mathematical precision and repetitive geometric patterns to create optical illusions. Here, geometric shapes, like circles, squares, and lines, are used extensively to trigger our wild imaginations.
Some of the extraordinary minds behind Optical Art were the French-Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, and Josef Albers. The merger of Bauhaus style and Constructivism created enough room for this art of high-contrast designs, distorted patterns, and repetitive lines in the 1960s.
Works of Bridget Riley and other pioneer artists of Op Art challenged human perception with a perception of movement, simulated vibrations, and shifts in depth—viewers get mesmerized with the hypnotic effect of this geometric art.
M.C. Escher: Working with Impossible Shapes
No discussion of geometric art and geometric painting is complete without the mention of the Dutch graphic artist, Maurits Cornelis Escher (M.C. Escher). Though he intended to pursue a career in architecture like his father, he eventually worked on lithographs, woodcuts, and mezzotints, which were greatly inspired by mathematics, especially geometry. His extraordinary works showed exceptional mathematical ideas and sequences like tessellations.
He was known for the concept of building infinite staircases and for his artistic visualization of mathematical series, and he, quite fascinatingly, didn’t study math after elementary school!
He was intrigued to work on hyperbolic and projective geometry, like the geometry of space. His designs give a feel of ‘impossible' architecture, making the complex mathematical concepts visible through artistic depictions.
What is Topology, and How was M.C. Escher Inspired by Topology and Symmetry Mathematics?
He studied the fundamental structure of objects through the concept of topology, where connectedness and continuity of patterns matter more than exact length and angles of the geometric shapes. Escher also merged mathematical symmetry with mathematics in his designs.
While doing the tessellating patterns, he found that there were more irregular polygons that were never included in tessellations by mathematicians. So, he introduced some unique concepts of reflections, glide reflections, translations, and rotations as he was experimenting with patterns beyond triangles, squares, and hexagons.
Inspired by mathematician H.S.M. Coxeter’s book, Escher created wonderful representations of hyperbolic space in his works, like Limit III, a woodcut, 1959. Some of the works worthy of mention are Print Gallery, lithograph, 1956; Drawing Hands, lithograph, 1948; Fish and Scales, woodcut, 1959; and many more.
Contemporary & Digital Geometry: The Precision and Poetry of Geometric Art Continues
In the era of digitized dreams and algorithms, geometry has to shake hands with technology. Contemporary artists are using state-of-the-art technologies to push the boundaries of these mathematically precise designs.
The computer-generated programs help them create algorithmic art, complex fractal patterns, parametric installations, tessellations, computational geometry, and immersive geometric art in painting, sculpture, and architecture. This shows the magical and resilient power of geometry to adapt to innovation while rooted in its fundamental logic.
Contemporary artists like Felipe Pantone, Sophie Smallhorn, Sarah Morris, and Rasheed Araeen, and street artists like Akash Nihalani, experiment with evolving patterns with bold creations and mind-blowing designs, weaving architecture, art, and urban motifs into their creations.
Morris’s film ‘Points on a Line’ points to the urban landscapes, while Rasheed’s interactive creation ‘Zeo to Infinity’ includes audience participation and other prominent works dealing with the socio-political significance of geometry. These artists try to reestablish the fact that mathematical expression, especially geometric expressions, remains a fundamental language of contemporary exploration.
In modern gallery spaces like TERAVARNA, this abstract math art and definitive forms of geometric painting and artwork continue to trigger awe and wonder. Viewers are compelled to find the logic behind precision and the poetry of lines and curves, creating ripples in our memory long after the scrolls and gallery visits end.
