The Elements
Earth, water, air and fire, and other basic substances, as allegories in art and as forces artists let act directly on their work.
2 works · 10 related artists
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The idea that the world is built from a few basic substances runs through many cultures: earth, water, air and fire in the Greek tradition, and water, fire, wood, metal and earth in Chinese thought. Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Water and Fire (both 1566) build profile heads for the Habsburg court from fish and shells, and from burning logs, candles and guns.
Modern artists let the elements act directly. Yves Klein scorched sheets of cardboard with a gas burner in his fire paintings of 1961, and Cai Guo-Qiang ignites trails of gunpowder on paper, keeping the scorch marks as drawings. Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field (1977) sets 400 steel poles in the New Mexico desert to attract storms. Cameron Robbins builds machines that let the wind guide a pen across paper, and Etsuko Ichikawa draws with molten glass, so that heat burns lines into the sheet.
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The Environment
The Fantastic
The Mundane
The Seasons
The Senses
The Sublime
Time
Times of Day
Traces, Indexes, and Implied Presence
Trauma and Struggle
Urbanization
Utopia
Vacant and Vacated Spaces
Violence
Virtue and Vice
Visual Perception
War and Military
