Stage II

2016, Dóra Maurer

Stage II 2016 is an abstract, acrylic painting on PVC in five separate parts, two of which are partially overlaid on top of two of the other parts during installation. The overall dimensions of the work are two metres by six metres. The elements from left to right are three irregularly-shaped vertical rectangles in turquoise, blue and orange respectively, and two curving, bridge-like forms in red. The central blue form partially overlaps the turquoise form to its left, while the orange form is set at an angle and slightly overlaps the larger of the curving red form to its right. The overall effect is one of movement and the work continues Maurer’s earlier explorations into how geometric forms are affected by colour and colour perception, as well as their position and orientation in space.

Riches

2007, Eva Rothschild

Rothschild is best known for her geometric sculptures combining industrial processes and traditional craft and employing unusual materials such as leather, paper and Plexiglas. In this sculpture, two black triangular Perspex panels are joined in the corner of the room. Thin rods protrude from the Perspex but, when viewed from a distance, the effect is of a two-dimensional rhombus shape, as if the sculpture refuses to reveal its own depth.

Gallery label, July 2015

Magenta, Emerald, Lapis

2009, Anna Barham

Magenta, Emerald, Lapis is a colour digital projection in which Barham uses a tangram puzzle (a square cut into seven pieces that can be re-formed in various ways) to create letterforms, eventually building up words into phrases that are anagrams of the work’s title. In the projection, the tangram pieces are shuffled and reshuffled until they become recognisable as letters, demonstrating how composite symbols can be transformed by the reordering of their parts. The work exists as a Quicktime file on a USB memory stick and has to be projected directly from a computer. The resolution of the image is 1024 x 768 pixels. It exists in an edition of three, and Tate’s copy is number three in the edition. Each edition is accompanied by a certificate of authentication printed on a unique blind embossing of the shapes from the film. The work was originally conceived to be accompanied by a structure for viewers to sit on made from tangram shapes like those being manipulated in the film. The seating is reconfigurable to make a new arrangement to suit each venue where the work is exhibited. However, the projection can also be shown without the seating.

Line Describing a Cone

1973, Anthony McCall

Line Describing a Cone is made from a beam of white light emitted from a film projector positioned at one end of a darkened room. Passing through the projector is an animated film of a thin, arcing line that, frame by frame, gradually joins up to become a complete circle. Over the course of thirty minutes this line of light traces the circumference of the circle as a projection on the far wall while the beam takes the form of a three-dimensional hollow cone. Mist from smoke machines gives the beam of light a greater density, making it appear almost tangible.

Eclypse

1978, Nabil Nahas

Eclypse signals Nahas' interest in abstraction and its relationship to principles of geometric patterning such as infinite repetition and cyclical movement. The artist was inspired by naturally occurring crystalline structures, as well as medieval buildings and textile designs from Cairo, Egypt. He has said "my work is about observing nature in the multiplicity of its dimensions, from microcosm to macrocosm—without forgetting to look at my immediate surroundings." Nahas’ paintings from this period are filled with multi-coloured shapes and arrangements along different planes. They might suggest the intersection of celestial bodies, or the passing of light into shadow.

Gallery label, November 2021

Hanging Disc Toy

c.1980, Li Yuan-chia

Li arrived in London in 1966. He began to make environmental shows, placing works within a gallery whose floor was covered with autumn leaves, or creating installations of suspended objects through which the spectator could walk. He also made works that consisted of large, suspended colourful metal discs with magnetic wooden blocks, each carrying a photograph. The spectator was invited to move these blocks around the disc. Unfortunately, the work is now too fragile for this to happen.

Gallery label, October 2016

[no title]

1992, Shirazeh Houshiary

These images are made from the layering of words inspired by texts by 13th century Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. Houshiary has said that the repeated words represent the act of breathing. For her, inhalation and exhalation through the lungs gives a feeling of absence and presence. The prints reveal language as a living organism. The repeated round forms convey a spinning movement, reinforced by the title ‘Round Dance’. For Houshiary, these centrifugal, whirling forces are present in all nature. Round Dance connects culture to nature, and words to biology.

Gallery label, June 2021

Pathway

2018, Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín

Pathway (Camino) 2018 is a woven work incorporating synthetic cotton and agave thread by Antonio Pichilla Quiacain, an artist of Maya-Tz`utujil descent, one of the twenty-one Maya ethnic groups in present-day Guatemala. Demonstrating a complex weaving process, its geometric weave is made with interlaced flat strips with knotted ends that dangle down from the zigzag outline of the piece. These strips reference the sashes worn by Maya-Tz`utujil women in San Pedro de La Laguna, Guatemala, the artist’s birthplace. A sash around the waist represents the symbolic values of fertility, motherhood and female ancestral knowledge. Here, by criss-crossing these strips of fabric, they are no longer read linearly, but rather evoke an infinite, cyclical pathway of time, as suggested by the work’s title. As in many other works by Pichilla, the use of the colour red links to the multiple colours found in the diverse types of maize grown in the Americas – a crop holding sacred values since the classical period of Maya civilisation and protected today by indigenous groups from the multinational monopolised market.

Two Triangles

1957, Benode Behari Mukherjee

Two Triangles 1957 is a paper collage on card that features an array of coloured shapes including two large purple triangles in the centre, as well as circles, rectangles, waves, straight lines and dotted areas made up of small rectangular patches of paper. The composition is abstract, with the shapes overlapping or butting up against one another to form a flat, colourful arrangement. Despite this abstract quality, the purple triangles, which have white vertical lines running down their centres, could be seen to represent boats or tents, with the wave, circle and squiggle that immediately surround them suggestive of the sea, a sun or moon and foliage. All of the forms in the work are made from pieces of cut paper in bright hues that are pasted onto beige-coloured card.

The Snail

1953, Henri Matisse

After 1948, Henri Matisse was confined to bed due to ill health. Though he could no longer paint, he produced many works by cutting or tearing shapes from paper painted in bright colours. An assistant then pasted the cut-outs on a white sheet following his instructions. Matisse found this technique liberating: ‘Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it ... I draw straight into the colour.’ Matisse got the idea for this composition while drawing a snail. ‘I became aware of an unrolling, I found an image in my mind purified of the shell, then I took the scissors.’

Gallery label, April 2025

Pentagon

2008, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

In Pentagon, Farmanfarmaian is inspired by traditional Persian mirror-mosaic work (ayneh-kari) found in architectural spaces, primarily shrines. Symmetry and repetition and the principles of mystical geometry are central to her practice. Her work blurs the lines between craft, art and everyday life set by modern art history. She writes: ‘Mirror works … do not belong only to museums or the rich … they are part of our living artistic experience and they each have an ancient history behind them. But mirrors speak to contemporary human beings as well.’ Iran’s architectural traditions influence Farmanfarmaian’s work. However, her years of living and travelling abroad also bring a global approach to her artistic techniques.

Gallery label, June 2021

Carpet

1992, Lubaina Himid CBE RA

Carpet draws an allusion to patchwork and the idea that cloth can bear the traces of activities for which it is used. It is part of a series entitled ‘Revenge: A Masque in Five Tableaux’, comprising 12 works that blend modernist abstraction and African textiles and traditions. Himid was born in Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, but moved to England shortly after her birth. Her paintings, woodcuts, installations, works on paper and curatorial projects often emphasise the contribution of African migrants to the development of European culture.

Gallery label, September 2016

Untitled

1964, Yuko Nasaka

This work is comprised of eight plaster panels. Nasaka Yūko placed each one onto a mechanical turntable, inspired by the potter’s wheel. As it rotated, she carved patterns into the plaster using a palette knife. She then applied a layer of dark-blue silver lacquer to the surface. Nasaka was part of the second generation of Gutai artists who experimented with technology. Much of their work used industrial materials and techniques, referencing Japan’s rapid economic growth.

Gallery label, December 2020

Correspondence

1993, Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan works in series, which evolve over many years. He began his 'Correspondence' paintings in 1991. They consist of single brushstrokes of blue or grey paint of a similar length, on a white ground. The brushstrokes are painted vertically or horizontally, or more usually a combination of both directions. Each brushstroke creates a relationship to the white canvas ground and to other brushstrokes. Lee Ufan mixes his pigments with ground stone, which produces a grainy residue on the surface of the canvas. The artist has written, 'every brushstroke must show the correspondence of living things endowed with rhythm and breathing'.

Gallery label, September 2004

Untitled

2017, Zarina Hashmi

This is one of three Untitled collages in Tate’s collection by Zarina Hashmi which date from 2017 (Tate T15100–T15102). Each one is made from off-cuts and printed papers collected by Hashmi throughout her life-long engagement with paper and printmaking. The artist has improvised their abstract compositions by layering and weaving black and white paper, cut into thick and thin strips and simple geometric shapes, ranging from linear dissections of the page to repeated regular triangular forms that echo architectural features. This method of paring down ornament and expression to their essential form is characteristic of Hashmi’s practice throughout her career, in which she has explored themes of displacement, home, memory and silence through the language of minimal abstraction. For instance, Letters from Home 2004 is a series of eight prints – also in Tate’s collection (Tate P80181) – that combines the cartography of homes, floor plans and routes with written correspondence between the artist and her sister based in Pakistan, to consider the place played by home in a life of continual travel. The artist and her family were forced to move to Pakistan from India following Partition in 1947; after several sojourns in locations across Europe and America, she settled in New York in 1967 where she still lives and works. The critic Anushka Rajendran has described the collages and their symbolic association with Hashmi’s past: ‘Here, the strips of paper, which are carefully glued together, seem to suit the precariousness of recalling the past. It is almost as if they were jolted out of the faux certainty of memory to reveal themselves for what they are – an illusion.’ (Rajendran 2009, accessed 27 March 2018.)

Chessmen One

1961, Anwar Jalal Shemza

The painting Chessmen One depicts four horizontal rows of black chess pieces which increase in height from the top down. They are set against a lightly textured pale blue background. Each row of chessmen is decorated with sinuous linear detail in different colours, red on the top row, blue on the second, cream on the third and green on the fourth. Each horizontal division between the rows is painted in one of these colours. The chessmen are depicted in a schematic, near abstract frontal view that emphasises the flatness and two-dimensional surface of the canvas.

In the Triangle

1973–4, Rebecca Horn

In the Triangle consists of a large, two-dimensional fabric triangle, strengthened by wooden inserts. A female performer stands within the triangle such that her head protrudes from its apex while the sloping sides extend in front and behind her. Her body is entirely concealed within the fabric. ‘Wearing’ the triangle in this way, the individual performer is transformed into a large geometric shape.

Abstract Composition

c.1915, Jessica Dismorr

Dismorr’s writings and art reflect her interest in the city and its architectural forms. Here, the simplified elements suggest arches, piers and girders, suspended in a darkened, undefined space. The sense of depth sets her style apart from the flatter compositions of other vorticist artists. Vorticism was unusual for an early twentieth-century avant-garde group, in that it included female artists among its core members. Dismorr and Helen Saunders both showed work at the group’s exhibitions. They also contributed to its journal, Blast, which supported the Suffragette movement for women’s rights.

Gallery label, October 2020

Constellation According to the Laws of Chance

c.1930, Jean Arp (Hans Arp)

Arp felt that modern society had lost touch with nature and had become too dependent on reason. He hoped to address this by creating art that consciously evoked the forms and laws of nature. The rounded shapes in this painted relief suggest clouds, while the ‘laws’ in the title are those of flux and chance that characterise the ‘inaccessible order’ of nature.

Gallery label, January 2022

“Untitled” (Double Portrait)

1991, Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Gonzalez-Torres often used simple forms loaded with highly charged emotional and political meaning. The rings could be wedding bands, conjoined to create the symbol for infinity – and eternal love. The use of two identical circular objects occurs throughout Gonzalez-Torres’s work as a sign of ‘perfect lovers’. Their exact symmetry also alludes to gay love.

Gallery label, October 2016

Drawing for Sculpture

1968, Rasheed Araeen

This is one of a group of eight drawings in Tate’s collection with the same title, Drawing for Sculpture, which date from the 1960s and early 1970s. Each one is drawn on a sheet of squared paper. Some of the sheets are headed ‘CALCULATION SHEET’ and bear the imprint of the company ‘British Hydrocarbon Chemicals Ltd’, which later merged with BP. Araeen produced most of these drawings while he was working as a civil engineering assistant in London. Ranging from precisely drawn preparatory sketches for sculptures to more immediate free-hand line drawings accompanied by the artist’s notes, the drawings collectively provide an insight into Araeen’s working processes, informed by his early training as a civil engineer. For economic reasons many of Araeen’s early proposals were never realised as finished sculptures. These eight drawings were shown in Rasheed Araeen, Before and After Minimalism 1959–1974 at Aicon Gallery, London in 2010.

Composition in Blue Module

1947–51, Saloua Raouda Choucair

Choucair was one of the few Lebanese artists of her generation devoted to geometric abstraction. Composition in Blue Module dates from the late 1940s and early 1950s, when she was studying in Paris. The blues, purple and lighter tones show the subtle shifts of colour that characterised her early painting. Like many of her paintings, it uses the two basic elements of Islamic design – the straight line and the curve – as a starting point to create simple shapes which she duplicates in various combinations and divisions.

Gallery label, July 2019

Metaesquema

1958, Hélio Oiticica

Oiticica often worked in series, or bodies of works. The Metaesquema include over 350 small scale paintings on card. These compositions of opaque, monochrome, geometric forms, often in primary colours, were inspired by the abstract art of Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich. In contrast to the rigorous order and structure of both European artists, however, Oiticica introduces elements of instability into his works. The forms appear to jostle and bump together as though they are moving.

Gallery label, November 2015