Altered and Substituted Canvases

About

Here the canvas stops being a neutral ground for paint and becomes the point. In postwar Italy Alberto Burri stitched torn sacking into pictures from the early 1950s, and Lucio Fontana punctured and later slit monochrome surfaces to open them onto real space. Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi and Turi Simeti pushed shapes into stretched fabric from behind, so that light and shadow, not pigment, draw the image.

Others reshaped the support itself. Frank Stella and Robert Mangold cut their paintings into irregular outlines in the 1960s; Sam Gilliam draped unstretched, stained canvas from walls and ceilings; the French Supports/Surfaces group showed bare stretchers and loose cloth. Daniel Buren adopted ready-made striped awning fabric in the mid-1960s. Sergej Jensen and Oscar Murillo sew together burlap and worn, marked fabrics. Look at the edges and back as well as the front: tension, seams, cuts and bulges carry the meaning.