Tangled Forms
Knotted, interwoven and overlapping lines or forms that twist through each other with no clear beginning or end.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Tangled forms hold the eye by refusing to let it rest. Early medieval carvers and metalworkers in northern Europe loved interlace: Viking-age art in the Urnes style of the 11th century twists slender animals into looping knots, and carved stone crosses in Britain and Ireland carry endlessly braided bands. In 1498 Leonardo da Vinci painted the ceiling of the Sala delle Asse in Milan as a canopy of intertwined branches and golden cord.
Modern art gave tangling new energy. Cy Twombly's grey canvases of the late 1960s fill with looping, scrawled lines, Eva Hesse's Right After (1969) hangs resin-coated cords in a sagging web, and Brice Marden's Cold Mountain paintings of 1988–91 knot calligraphic strokes into dense mesh. Furniture makers such as Joseph Walsh bend thin layers of wood into sweeping, overlapping curves. Look for where lines pass over and under, and whether any single path can be followed through.
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