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Pattern, Crime & Decoration

 - Pattern, Crime & Decoration
Catalogue of the double exhibition devoted to the Pattern & Decoration movement, with numerous previously unpublished archives.
Pattern, Crime & Decoration features the groundbreaking, artist-led American art movement Pattern & Decoration, which started in the mid-1970s and lasted until the mid-1980s. Often viewed as the last organized art movement of the 20th century, it chronologically straddles the end of modernism and the beginning of postmodernism, through its rejection of the rigid tenets of formalism and its embrace of decorative motifs and non-Western visual forms. Strongly grounded in feminism, it included many women artists and sought to highlight some kinds of arts and crafts often dismissed as belonging to the domestic or decorative sphere such as tapestry, quilting, wallpaper or embroidery.
Against the purist, prescriptive background of the dominant art forms of their time such as Minimalism and Conceptualism, Pattern & Decoration signaled the end of the reductivist arc of formalist modernism and the beginning of a new era, by freely and subversively borrowing from the formal vocabulary of Islamic art, Mexican and Indian cultures, or Roman and Byzantine mosaics, diverting the rigidity of the minimalist grid to create repeated patterns that boldly emphasized figurative tropes, bright colors, flowering outlines and arabesques. The movement, gathered around the writings of art critic Amy Goldin (1926-1978), was supported by art dealers Holly Solomon in New York and Bruno Bischofberger in Switzerland. Although Pattern & Decoration was critically and commercially successful at its inception, it faded from view after the 1980s.
In retrospect, it can now be viewed as a forerunner for many art currents that followed, with its use of deconstructed, loose shapes, interest in non-Western art, dazzling colors and mixed patterns used to reject the patriarchal, Eurocentric framework of modernism as embodied in Adolf Loos's 1910 essay Ornament and Crime.
Here, artists from the Pattern & Decoration movement are presented alongside forerunners like George Sugarman (1912-1999), as well as American and European artists from the same era whose work shares similar formal concerns.
Works by Lynda Benglis, Cynthia Carlson, Jennifer Cecere, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Brad Davis, Noël Dolla, Sam Gilliam, Tina Girouard, Simon Hantaï, Valerie Jaudon, Richard Kalina, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Alvin Loving, Kim MacConnel, Rodney Ripps, Tony Robbin, Miriam Schapiro, Alan Shields, Ned Smyth, George Sugarman, Claude Viallat, Betty Woodman, George Woodman, Mario Yrissary, Robert Zakanitch, Joe Zucker.

Published following the eponymous exhibitions at MAMCO, Geneva, from October 10, 2018 to February 3, 2019, and Consortium Museum, Dijon, from May 16 to October 25, 2019.
Edited by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim.
Texts by Lionel Bovier, Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim, Lawrence Weiner, Brad Davis, George Sugarman, Valerie Jaudon, Richard Kalina, Tony Robbin, Joe Zucker, Cynthia Carlson, Tina Girouard, Miriam Schapiro, Robert Zakanitch, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, Lynda Benglis, Amy Goldin, John Perrault, Carrie Rickey, Robert Jensen & Patricia Conway, Neil Prize...
 
published in September 2020
bilingual edition (English / French)
25,5 x 25,5 cm (hardcover)
256 pages (color & b/w ill.)
 
ISBN : 978-2-37896-127-5
EAN : 9782378961275
 
sold out
 
 
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