Pathway

2018, Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín

Pathway (Camino) 2018 is a woven work incorporating synthetic cotton and agave thread by Antonio Pichilla Quiacain, an artist of Maya-Tz`utujil descent, one of the twenty-one Maya ethnic groups in present-day Guatemala. Demonstrating a complex weaving process, its geometric weave is made with interlaced flat strips with knotted ends that dangle down from the zigzag outline of the piece. These strips reference the sashes worn by Maya-Tz`utujil women in San Pedro de La Laguna, Guatemala, the artist’s birthplace. A sash around the waist represents the symbolic values of fertility, motherhood and female ancestral knowledge. Here, by criss-crossing these strips of fabric, they are no longer read linearly, but rather evoke an infinite, cyclical pathway of time, as suggested by the work’s title. As in many other works by Pichilla, the use of the colour red links to the multiple colours found in the diverse types of maize grown in the Americas – a crop holding sacred values since the classical period of Maya civilisation and protected today by indigenous groups from the multinational monopolised market.

Forms Emerging

1967, Anwar Jalal Shemza

Anwar Jalal Shemza deliberately chose simple geometric shapes to work with as limited building blocks. He used them to experiment with different arrangements and compositions. Discussing his use of geometry he said, ‘A circle – a square – a puzzle – for which a lifetime is not enough.’ His study of Islamic art across different periods and locations informed his practice. His former tutor at the Slade School of Art, Andrew Forge, remarked: ‘His pictures are not mere patterns but images, and their forms, whether painted or drawn, invest the surface with a mysterious life.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Net-Grid (my dad knows nothing)

2020, Mandy El-Sayegh

Net-Grid (my dad knows nothing) 2020 is a large-scale, unframed painting part of an ongoing series of ‘Net-Grids’ started in 2010. In these paintings El-Sayegh works with silkscreen print directly onto canvas, creating a surface for a layered painting and collage process using found images and text. Overlaying scraps of newsprint from the Financial Times, found objects and silkscreen prints with hand-painted grids, she seeks to examine the pervasive circulation of images and information, as well as the structures that contain them.

After Dinner

2018, Farah Al Qasimi

This is one of a group of photographs in Tate’s collection by Farah al Qasimi that present interiors and scenes of striking colours, shimmering textures and graphic textiles. They were taken in the United Arab Emirates and the United States, countries between which the artist lives and works, playfully engaging with cultural signifiers, gendered expressions of identity and colonial legacies in the Middle East. Each photograph exists in an edition of five with two artist’s proofs.

Three Graces

2021, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas

Banho de Rio

2017, Beatriz Milhazes

Banho de Rio (River Bath) 2017 is a large-scale painting in acrylic on canvas composed from different coloured geometric shapes that are arranged in overlapping formations along a central vertical axis decorated with a floral motif. Horizontal stripes in ochre, grey and white are interrupted at the centre by a vertical strip of white, grey and ochre rectangles. Overlapping oval shapes cascade across these horizontal lines. Each oval is filled with black and white waves and the intersections of the ovals with patterns of orange and black vertical lines. Moving toward the centre of the composition are another set of oval shapes in either orange and black or purple and orange stripes, followed by petal-like shapes drawn out in black wave-like lines. In the central column of the composition, placed atop of this array of forms and colours, are a series of floral motifs that draw together a wider range of colours including pink, lime green, pale blue and orange. The combination of these different elements creates a sense of rhythm and movement within a given structure.

Night Sky #19

1998, Vija Celmins

Night Sky #19 is a charcoal drawing on coated white paper that depicts a vast field of stars in the night sky. It is signed and dated by the artist at the bottom right corner of the landscape-oriented sheet of paper. This drawing – as is the case with the majority of Vija Celmins’s drawings, prints and paintings – is based on a photograph rather than the direct observation of nature. Night Sky #19, as its numerical title suggests, is one of an extensive series of night sky images produced by the artist in the 1990s, directly related to earlier representations of galaxies from the 1960s and 1970s, seen in one half of the dual-image drawing Untitled (Desert–Galaxy) 1974 (Tate AR00162). For both series Celmins obtained the source materials from books, newspapers and magazines: published photographic clippings that the artist used as a platform for her artistic production. As the art historian Briony Fer has commented:

Small White Pebble Circles

1987, Richard Long CBE

Since 1967 Long has produced sculptures using natural materials which he collects during his long cross-country walks. Sometimes they are assembled in the same rural sites in which he finds the materials, sometimes he brings them inside the gallery spaces. Long has described the subject of his work as ‘a balance between patterns of nature and the formalism of human abstract ideas, like lines and circles. It is where my human characteristics meet the natural forces and patterns of the world.’

Gallery label, February 2011

From Surface to Surface

1971, remade 1986, Susumu Koshimizu

Koshimizu investigates the substance of wood by sawing planks into different shapes, exposing their surface qualities through different kinds of repetitive cuts. Koshimizu was part of Mono Ha (‘School of Things’), which reacted against the embrace of technology and visual trickery in mid-1960s Japanese art. They sought to understand ‘the world as it is’ by exploring the essential properties of materials, often combining organic and industrial objects and processes.

Gallery label, January 2016

To a Summer’s Day 2

1980, Bridget Riley

Coloured stripes cross along a common band, reminiscent of twisting ribbons, to create a wave pattern. The choice of colours was intended to provoke an optical mix in the eye, with as much interaction as possible between colours. Light blue and yellow ochre form the basic pair of colours into which occasional threads of rose and violet are introduced to accentuate the warm and cold accents across the canvas. The title refers to William Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’

Gallery label, October 2016

Dageraad From the Air

1978–9, Donald Locke

Dageraad was a sugar plantation. In 1763 it was the site of Guyana’s first rebellion of enslaved people. The painting evokes the plantation system that shaped Guyana’s history under Dutch and British colonial rule. The grid reflects the intervention on the land, sectioned by dykes and drainage canals. Donald Locke said: ‘In the Caribbean, the most dominant sociological event is the plantation system. I grew up at a time when the plantation system was still in existence. It dominated the sky; it dominated your life from beginning to end.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Untitled

1976, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

This work presents a series of volumetric renderings of cubes, placed serially against each other to form an intricate geometric pattern that also reveals interlocking rhomboid and diamond shapes. The reflections formed within its fragmented mirrors can change dramatically, depending on the surroundings and lighting. Farmanfarmaian’s work relates to the geometric forms of American minimalist sculpture as well as the patterns found in Iran’s architectural monuments. Her use of geometric shapes is underpinned by her studies of Sufi cosmology, in which each shape has an intrinsic symbolic meaning.

Gallery label, April 2013

Casa

1970, Mohammed Melehi

The title of the painting Casa is a common shortening for the city of Casablanca in the artist’s native Morocco. It can be read as an abstracted cityscape, informed by Melehi’s nomadic lifestyle which saw him travelling from Marrakech to Rome, Paris and New York. In the 1960s, during his stay in New York, he had already worked on a series of paintings with titles like New York, Above Manhattan and Sleeping Manhattan that set up a dialogue with the work of American painters such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Nolan and Jules Olitski (whom Melehi met in the early 1960s when the American artist exhibited in Rome at Topazia Alliata Gallery, run by the mother of Melehi’s then wife, Toni Maraini).

WORK62-W

1962, Minoru Onoda

Onoda Minoru was part of the second generation of Gutai artists. He began making paintings using dots of various sizes and colours in 1961. Onoda described these as ‘propagation paintings’. For him, the systematic repetition of dots was a way to think mechanically. Through this technique, he hoped to counter the subjectivity of action-based painting. Onoda was also responding to the industrialisation of Japan during the post-war period. He found inspiration in the ‘vast meaninglessness’ of machine-made, identically duplicated objects.

Gallery label, December 2020

Northern Nigerian Landscape

1964, Uzo Egonu

During the early 1960s, Egonu made a number of works which drew on his childhood memories. Born in Nigeria in 1931, he moved to Britain at the age of 14. This work demonstrates his nostalgia for Nigeria through references to the Nigerian landscape, architecture and local traditions. It is an abstract rendition of a northern Nigerian village. Perspective is flattened and the rounded huts stacked on top of each other are outlined with black. Winding lines that could represent the limbs of a tree, paths or rivers divide the painting into distinct parts that are then filled in with decorative designs.

Gallery label, October 2022

Inspiration from the sea

1963, Ramses Younan

Younan was an artist, writer and political activist. In the late 1930s he co-founded the Egyptian surrealist group Art and Freedom. He believed in the revolutionary power of the imagination, and used the unconscious mind as a source for his art. Starting from an initial improvisation he would develop and refine the surface of his paintings to produce complex abstract compositions. Here forms seem to dissolve and merge into each other. The colours resemble those of an Egyptian landscape.

Gallery label, January 2019

II

1980, Frank Stella

Explosion

1965–6, Roy Lichtenstein

Beginning in 1962 Lichtenstein borrowed images of explosions from popular war comics for use in his paintings. The subject embodies the revolutionary nature of Pop art and suggests the very real threat of annihilation by nuclear explosion that was prevalent at that time (the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962). But Lichtenstein was also interested in the way dynamic events like explosions were depicted in the stylised format of comic book illustration. This print incorporates many of the hallmarks of his early painting style: flat primary colours, Benday dots, outlines and schematic drawing.

Gallery label, September 2004

Planes on Modulated Surface (Study) (61)

1957, Lygia Clark

These drawings show Clark working through a number of variations on a theme. They explore different relationships of plane and line, but result in a sense of three-dimensional sculptural form articulated on a flat surface by the areas of light and shade, positive and negative. The composition suggests a series of folds along linear divisions, perhaps anticipating her later sculptural works titled ‘Creatures’ which are composed of hinged aluminium plates.

Gallery label, May 2012

Painting in Six Related Rhythms

1955, Denis Williams

This painting was inspired by organic growth, mathematics and geometric abstraction. Denis Williams structured it on a grid of one-inch squares that he then segmented to create a lattice. The result resembles an irregular crystal or a complex architectural space. This was a brief exploration into geometric abstraction for the artist. Williams’s daughter Evelyn A Williams has observed that ‘it is interesting to consider to what extent non-European “survival rhythms” are embedded in the subconscious personal iconography of Williams’ abstract work.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Untitled

c.1950s, Fahrelnissa Zeid

Fahrelnissa Zeid used swirling, crossing lines to paint this abstract artwork. After drawing the lines in pencil, she filled in the shapes made between them with black, green, blue and pink. The result is a complex, kaleidoscopic effect. Zeid made the painting when she was living in London in the 1950s. In 1949 she had taken her first transatlantic flight and was captivated by the abstracted perspective of aerial views. She later translated their scale and feeling into the whirling shapes that appear in this painting. A divisionist effect is achieved, whereby individual patches of colour are built up to create an overall composition.

Gallery label, November 2021

The Corridor

1950, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Vieira da Silva was a key figure within the field of expressive abstraction in post-war Paris. However her work always retained a strong basis of reference to the visible world. Many of her paintings depict labyrinthine interior spaces, with complex or multiple lines of perspective. The elaborate mosaic and tiled surfaces recall the domestic architecture of her native Portugal. This picture was first exhibited in 1950 as The Corridor, but later became known as The Grey Room.

Gallery label, July 2012

Number 23

1948, Jackson Pollock

Pollock began to drip and pour paint in 1947. This work, in which streams of black and white enamels were poured onto the surface, shows the improvisatory possibilities of this method. The sweeping arc of Pollock's gesture can be seen in the liquid black, which has bled into the white painted background to become grey. This acts as a base over which the thicker white paint is deliberately woven. The effect is rhythmic but controlled, energetic but delicate. Although there was an element of chance, Pollock frequently emphasised the importance of decisions over the merely accidental.

Gallery label, July 2008

Composition in Blue Module

1947–51, Saloua Raouda Choucair

Choucair was one of the few Lebanese artists of her generation devoted to geometric abstraction. Composition in Blue Module dates from the late 1940s and early 1950s, when she was studying in Paris. The blues, purple and lighter tones show the subtle shifts of colour that characterised her early painting. Like many of her paintings, it uses the two basic elements of Islamic design – the straight line and the curve – as a starting point to create simple shapes which she duplicates in various combinations and divisions.

Gallery label, July 2019

Still Life with a Beer Mug

1921–2, Fernand Léger

Léger believed that art should be accessible to all. He moved away from pure abstraction and towards the stylised depiction of real objects. He put great emphasis on order, clarity and harmony. In the 1920s, he developed an interest in geometric compositions. This painting shows a relatively naturalistic still life of a workman’s lunch on a table. The primary colours of the mug and tablecloth contrast with the black and white patterns in the background

Gallery label, June 2021

Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp

1885, Georges Seurat

Seurat painted this work while holidaying on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1885. He made a study of this motif on the spot, but would have refined and developed the image in the studio. Seurat aimed to place painting on a scientific basis in its treatment of light and colour and, using a style known as Divisionism, juxtaposed small brushstrokes of complementary colours to create a luminous effect in his works. He painted the border on the canvas, but the frame is much later in date.

Gallery label, August 2004