Divergent Convergent

08/03/2024

Opening 8 March 2024, h 18:00-21:00

Modern art was born out of a break with academic art, both in terms of aesthetics and values, and with the culture of the 19th century. However, this change was the result of various studies of established techniques and styles and a critique of traditional art.

Avant-garde art – from Fauvism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism and even Abstract Expressionism – appropriates the main attributes of painting and sculpture. The characteristics that the masters of painting considered to be limitations, such as the flat surface and the support, became positive factors for the modernists. The flatness of the pictorial surface becomes the distinctive element of modern art.

As the art critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) said, the intersection of lines in Mondrian’s works accentuates the quadrangular structure of the painting with greater force than many figurative works in the pictorial tradition (C. Greenberg, Modernist Painting, 1961).

Therefore, contemporary art does not indicate a radical change with respect to academic art, but its natural evolution: art is always in continuity and the new currents cannot be read without taking into account the past.

Lanzarote Art Gallery’s new exhibition, Divergent | Convergent, emphasises this aspect. Modern art undoubtedly diverges from the figurative tradition in terms of subject matter, the way of painting and the way of representing reality, although these tendencies can converge, mix and create different expressive languages.

In this exhibition you will find works ranging from figurative art and impressionism to pure abstraction, connected by the common thread of representing different ways of seeing reality.

Aurora Argiolas

Art Historian