CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Focus on Materials
Works in which the character of a material, its weight, grain, texture or behaviour, largely decides the form and process.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Some artists and designers let the nature of a material set the terms: its weight, grain, flexibility, colour or behaviour under heat, rather than forcing it to imitate something else. The ideal of 'truth to materials' linked the Arts and Crafts movement to modernist direct carving.
In the late 1960s it became a programme. Robert Morris cut industrial felt and let it slump from the wall under its own weight, Eva Hesse worked with latex and fibreglass, and in Japan the Mono-ha artists set stone, steel, earth and glass in raw encounters. Robert Ryman tested white paint on steel, paper, linen and fibreglass. Cai Guo-Qiang ignites gunpowder on paper, and Farid Belkahia painted with henna and natural dyes on stretched lambskin. In furniture, George Nakashima kept the natural edges and cracks of walnut slabs. If the work cannot be imagined in another material, the material is the subject.
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