Linear Forms
Clean, ruler-straight lines and crisp-edged shapes with no trace of the hand, in painting, design and architecture.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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Linear forms read as planned and exact: edges are sharp, lines run true, and nothing betrays the wobble of a hand. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) is a clear architectural case, its thin roof slab and freestanding walls set out as a composition of lines and planes. Gerrit Rietveld's Red and Blue Chair (designed about 1918, coloured in the early 1920s) turns furniture into an arrangement of straight battens and boards.
In painting, the look was central to De Stijl and to hard-edge abstraction. Piet Mondrian worked with crisp black bars and rectangles from the 1920s, Carmen Herrera composed with a few razor-sharp edges from the 1950s, and Daniel Buren has used stripes of a fixed 8.7 cm width as a neutral tool since the mid-1960s. Luis Barragán paired long straight walls with intense colour. Look for taped edges, geometric accuracy and no visible brushwork.
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Radiating Lines
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