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Understanding abstract art

The Museum of Modern Art is located in the Cultural District in Fort Worth, Texas. It hosts collections of modern and contemporary art that have been developed during the post World War II era. The museum building was designed by a Japanese architect, Tadao Ando. Ando's design symbolizes the pure, unadorned elements of modern art. It is comprised of five long, flat-roofed pavilions situated on a man made pond with natural stones at the bottom. The building itself is clad in architectural concrete, and forty-foot high transparent glass framed in metal surround the concrete walls. The building allows natural light to flow through its spatial interiors not only because of its glass walls, but also because of its linear skylights that are continuous throughout the building.

On my visit to the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, I saw many works of art that were truly amazing. But the ones that fascinated me the most were a series of paintings by Lucio Fontana. On my first glance, the paintings just looked like a mono-colored canvas on which someone had stabbed many holes into. But upon closer observation, I realized that the single shade of one color which bore the numerous holes represented a dimension much deeper. Therefore, I am going to write a formal critic about two of Lucio Fontana's paintings entitled "Concetto Spaziale" (Spatial Concept), 1965 and "Concetto Spaziale" (Spatial Concept), 1952. Both the paintings were done by Lucio in the later 1940s. The paintings are from his Bocchi (Holes) series, where he took a radical step, and gorged and poked holes through the painted canvas calling them to mind black holes in outer space.

Although both these paintings have the same name, the time period in which they were created are very apart. In his 1952 painting, he used one of his famous techniques which he invented in the early 1940s. He first applied many shades and hues of colored paint in a circular motion and then made the holes in the canvas. Whereas, in his 1965 painting he chose to embrace the monochrome image, which is, a single carefully chosen color to suggest space as a spectral phenomenon.

Lucio's 1952 painting is from The Racholsky Collection. He uses paint, a powdered pigment, linen and cardboard attached to a wooden sketcher. He uses a wide color palette using hues of black, ash and gray and strokes of gold.. He paints the wrinkled linen covered cardboard in a circular motion to give the painting more depth and texture, allowing us to focus to


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