Math
Art built on number, geometry and rules: proportion systems, tilings, permutations and algorithms that shape how a work is made.
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About
Artists have used mathematics both as subject and as scaffolding. Renaissance painters constructed linear perspective with geometry, and Piero della Francesca wrote a treatise on it. Albrecht Dürer placed a magic square, each row adding up to 34, in his engraving Melencolia I (1514), and Luca Pacioli's book De divina proportione (1509) carried drawings of polyhedra by Leonardo da Vinci.
In the 20th century mathematics moved to the centre of the work. M. C. Escher's tilings and impossible spaces, such as Relativity (1953), grew from his study of symmetry. Sol LeWitt wrote wall drawings as sets of instructions that others could carry out, Hanne Darboven filled sheets with calculations derived from calendar dates, and Manfred Mohr began producing drawings from computer algorithms around 1969. Look for grids, repeated units, sequences worked through to exhaustion and titles that read like formulas.
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