Art historian, curator and critic Jules Langsner (1911-1967) is credited with the term ‘hard edge’ which he used to describe the essentially non-figurative characteristics of artwork produced in an exhibition in 1959 entitled ‘Four Abstract Classicists’ at the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
Artists Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, Karl Benjamin and John McLaughlin exhibited work that signalled a shift from the painterly energy of Abstract Expressionism to the aesthetic of Pop Art and Minimalism. Langsner wrote that their work was “not intended to invoke in the spectator any recollections of specific shapes he may have encountered in some other connection.” They were “finite, flat, rimmed by a hard clean edge” and further, “autonomous shapes, sufficient unto themselves.”
Undoubtedly, hard edge painters in the US found a connection with artists and architects impacted by the second World War in Europe, since many of them fled to the US and brought art theories and painting styles with them. Two of those believed influential were Joseph Albers, a German Bauhaus educator, painter and colour theorist who taught in the US after arriving in 1933 and Piet Mondrian, Neoplastic art theorist, Dutch De Stijl member, influential modern abstract artist and geometric abstract painter.
Many of our artworks re-imagine subject matter and transform elements to their essence with minimalist geometric areas of flat solid colour, sharp hard edge, shape and line. Inspired by mid-20th Century art and architecture, our images are a visual analysis that creatively probe complex conceptual dimensions and breath fresh creativity into vintage inspired aesthetics.
