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Ornament =Crime?
Gallery 1+2+B 08th Jul 2017 / 25th Feb 2018
Per Amor a l’ArtCollection
An organisation dedicated to art, research and social support, and promoter of this project.
Bombas Gens Centre d’ArtAvinguda Burjassot, 54 46009 ValènciaT. (+34) 963 463 [email protected] bombasgens.com
More information about the activities related to the exhibition:www.bombasgens.com
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More information: [email protected]
Ornament = Crime?Per Amor a l’Art CollectionThe exhibition Ornament = Crime? is the fi rst public presentation of the Per Amor a l’Art Collection at Bombas Gens Centre d’Art. The show focuses on the work of a series of artists who explore the realms of ornamentation and abstraction, and also on bonds and connections between them.
Bernard Frize, Plontois, 2012 © VEGAP, València, 2017
Imogen Cunningham, Sedum Cristate, 1920© Imogen Cunningham Trust
Anna-Eva Bergman, Untitled, 1970© VEGAP, València, 2017
It includes classic and contemporary artists whose images make use of, for instance, botany or fl owers, almost like abstract patterns based on the forms of nature. Other artists’ practices are based on repetition and differences of one sin-gle motif to create abstract forms that are no longer subject to the exhaustion of the fi gurative form. In their ornamental and abstract paintings, sculptures or moving images these artists produce new ways of seeing and interpreting the world in
practices that engage with their context, borrowing new space-time models from it. The work with straight lines and curves, strokes, writings, patterns, meshes and grids, folds and weaves, constellations and arabesques, the outlines of bodies, are other multiple articulations of fi gure and ground that coexist in artworks and drive working processes, transmitting an intention and always striking up a di-alogue with each new spectator. Frag-mentation and detail are other paths of
contemporary abstraction that trap the spectator and reveal a world of complex, rich and mixed forms in which multiple times and manifold histories are superim-posed. The title of the exhibition is a riff on Ornament and Crime, the essay written in Vienna in 1908 by the architect Adolf Loos, which became a kind of manifesto for “disornamentation” in art and in archi-tecture in the twentieth century. At the same time, modernist thinking and the fi rst theoretical essays on abstraction ad-vanced a radical separation between art and decoration. The fear that abstraction might be considered as a mere decora-tive exercise — connected to the real and devoid of spirituality and purity — led to the condemnation of ornamentation, per-ceived as a threat to the project of eman-cipation of the aesthetic experience. But, since the sixties we have witnessed other ideas and practices that have been worm-ing their way into hegemonic thinking in
order to propose a restoration mindful of the meanings, possibilities and functions of the ornamental, viewing it as structur-al rather than contingent. Postcolonial critical thinking, feminist theory, and so-cial consciousness are indebted to the restitution of the ornamental given that it had been condemned in modernism as feminine, undomesticated and primi-tive. Ornament = Crime? puts forward a different and open gaze attentive to the variations and diversities of the abstract project. It acknowledges the productive dialectic between abstraction in its plu-ral and restless becoming, freed from its essentialness and its purity; and the orna-mental as autonomous beauty that cuts across times and cultures, fi gurative and abstract orders, and the categories of the Fine Arts and Decorative Arts.
