Use of Common Materials
Art made from ordinary, inexpensive stuff such as house paint, felt, bricks, rags or scrap, rather than traditional fine-art media.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Use of Common Materials are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Using common materials questions what art ought to be made of. When artists pick up household paint, builders' supplies or industrial offcuts, they bring associations of labour, daily life and low value into the work, and often a directness that costly media lack.
The Italian Arte Povera artists of the late 1960s made the approach a movement, working with soil, rags, wood and vegetables; Michelangelo Pistoletto's Venus of the Rags (1967) sets a copy of a classical statue against a heap of discarded clothing. In the United States, Carl Andre laid firebricks in Equivalent VIII (1966), and Eva Hesse and Robert Morris worked with latex, rubber and felt. A few years earlier Frank Stella had painted his black stripe paintings in commercial enamel. Tara Donovan builds large, cloud-like installations from plastic cups, straws and tape. Look for the gap between the humble source and the effect it achieves.
