Kanwal Krishna often depicted fractured landscapes and hillsides, as in Shivering Sun, where a luminescent haze caught inside colliding and intersecting trapezoids creates an unstable geometry that is alive and pulsating. His critiques of Indian and Asian politics—as in this work—are oblique, alluding to the earth’s instability through abstract forms. Born in Kamilia in Punjab, […]
A close look at Motif Rouge reveals it to be a self-portrait, recognizable from the artist’s curly hair and dark eyes; the contours of his face evoke the pebbles he painted on some of his “blue journeys.” During the 1960s, he made many self-portraits and also pursued new directions in saturated color, texture, and abstraction.
In Aslier’s etching Our Mother, a stylized, frontal female figure holds a boy and a girl. Suspended in the sky above is a male/female face alluding to nature’s fecundity, which is underscored by the mother’s bare breasts and the field she stands in. Dressed in native Turkish costume, she wears a richly embroidered sash and […]
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Before becoming a germinal figure in performance and installation art, Yayoi Kusama was one of the most original painters of the late 1950s and early ’60s. Her repetitive designs derive from the hallucinations she began suffering as a teenager, seeing dots and patterns covering everything around her. Her watercolors of the early ’50s often include […]
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The arc of Tony Rosenthal’s career virtually constitutes a history of modern sculpture. Working initially in Chicago, he carved Art Deco adornments for building exteriors. While stationed in Great Britain during World War II, he discovered the works of Henry Moore. After war’s end, Rosenthal worked in an increasingly abstract style. He spent much of […]
Elderoglu’s work is often described as abstract script painting, although he long denied the influence of calligraphy. His thin, unbroken black lines—which resemble scrawls accentuated with color—evoke letters from a hermetic alphabet. Both Six Lines of Abstracted Calligraphy and Mask (G1975.285) date from Elderoglu’s mature period, when he represented Turkey in various international exhibitions where […]
Greatly inspired by Turkish folk culture, Aslıer employed a variety of printmaking techniques to evoke everyday scenes in Anatolia. His early works, which are mostly in black and white, emphasize perspective and chiaroscuro—but in Germany he quickly adopted a more abstract idiom. Beginning in the late 1950s, his compositions lack depth, and figures are omitted. […]
In Christ in the Desert, Gujral mines dark terrain, moving away from the strong contours, clearly articulated figures, and voluminous forms of his murals. The picture dates from the post-independence period (1947–60), when Gujral was creating moody atmospheric paintings through thick, coarse brushstrokes, heavy use of black, and rhythmic juxtaposition of contrasting colors. Here the […]
Here, the figure of a stylized lion juxtaposed against a solar background emerges from a system of minute marks. Although the sun and lion had served as a Persian dynastic emblem since the 19th century, Zenderoudi associated them with Sufism. He has identified the standard held by the lion in this work as a reference […]
In depicting locks on grillwork, Zenderoudi reveals his interest in Iranian folk culture.1 According to Shi’ite Muslim tradition, locks contain special powers. Devotees attach them to the doors of holy places in order to seek help from a saint (wali), or fasten them to the exterior grillwork as a symbolic reminder of the shrine’s power […]