Mondrian 70th anniversary of death retrospective at the Tate Liverpool (Unit 7)

Me and another student got the chance to go to the Tate Liverpool to film a timelapse of an exhibition of Piet Mondrians studios being re created. Also for me to go and ask the curator of the exhibition some questions if possible, but through the three days we setup there it was very chaotic and i didn't manage to catch him.

Photograph inside the almost finished studio

Photograph of Curator Franz in almost finished studio

Second Photograph of Curator and Tate staff 

Mondrian's work and this retrospective is important to my project because of the relationship between Mondrians drive to capture an aesthetic purity and my similar drive to form a true condensed aesthetic of different contents and of death.

Mondrian's work developed from a time of post impressionism past and through many later movements. He developed off of cubism to reduce objects to their most basic forms. This was the start of work that was non-representational, they included many horizontal and vertical lines and as time went by he began to create all of his paintings using a grid-like format, painting squares and rectangles of mostly solid colours. The way Mondrian would reduce an object to basic forms is key to my work in that i am doing the same through editing; gathering particles and condensing the colours mathematically into larger still single coloured particles. This in essence is reducing and presenting, the difference is that Mondrian's content is different and mainly for aesthetic, my part is a metaphysical aesthetic look into something dead. The idea aside from aesthetic for Mondrian was that he believed that art reflected the underlying spirituality of nature, somehow the way he simplified subjects revealed this mystical energy.

Here are some of Mondrian's early to later paintings to show what it means to gradually change his content into basic forms.

After the rise of cubism, segmental painting

The painting above is about as expressive in this way that he'd ever be.

By this time his work is fully non-representational

Mondrian's most famous works are his paintings made up of pure red, yellow and blue, as well as black and white, but for a while he used shades of gray as well, and even his lines were dark gray instead of pure black.

Here is a final example with my own work to show how they correlate:

Original against condensed pixelated version.

Whereas even though its not too obvious Mondrian does the same things with Objects, just through hand and mind (not through digital editing) and is a simpler representation.