Biomorphism models artistic design elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms. Taken to its extreme it attempts to force naturally occurring shapes onto functional devices. [1]
Biomorphism models artistic design elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature and living organisms. Taken to its extreme it attempts to force naturally occurring shapes onto functional devices. [1]
Within the context of modern art, the term was coined by the British writer Geoffrey Grigson in 1935 [2] and subsequently used by Alfred H. Barr in the context of his 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. [3] Biomorphist art focuses on the power of natural life and uses organic shapes, with shapeless and vaguely spherical hints of the forms of biology. Biomorphism has connections with Surrealism and Art Nouveau.
The Tate Gallery's online glossary article on biomorphic form specifies that while these forms are abstract, they "refer to, or evoke, living forms...". The article goes on to list Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth as examples of artists whose work epitomises the use of biomorphic form. [4]
In July 2015 a Facebook Group was set up by British artist Andrew Charles. The group morphed into a movement over the following year and was described in a Manifesto by Charles on 16 July 2016, breaking down the Sculptural Genrea into specific patterns of creation forming no less than 8 necessary protocols for a work to conform to the term biomorphism.
The paintings of Yves Tanguy and Roberto Matta are also often cited as exemplifying the use of biomorphic form. [5] During and after World War II, Yves Tanguy's landscapes became emptier, which has been seen as a psychological portrait of wartime Europe. [6]
The use of metamorphosis through Picasso influenced Surrealism in the 1920s, and it appeared both as subject matter and as procedure in the figurative paintings of Leonora Carrington and in the more abstract, automatic works of André Masson. [7]
American artist Phoebe Adams is known for her biomorphic paintings and sculptures, [8] [9] which are in many museum collections. Desmond Morris, author of "The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal", is a biomorphic painter whose works are in museum collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London. [10]
American artists Andrew Topolski, Michael Zansky, Suzanne Anker, Frank Gillette, Michael Rees, and Bradley Rubenstein participated in exhibitions featuring biomorphic and biospheric paintings and digital art at Universal Concepts Unlimited (2000–2006). Michael Zansky's series, "Giants and Dwarves," spanned 5,000 square feet of carved, burned, and painted wooden panels with biomorphic forms. [11] [12]
The Sagrada Família church by Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona contains many features inspired by nature, such as branching columns intended to reflect trees. [13]
Other well known examples of biomorphism in architecture can be found in the Lotus Temple in New Delhi, by Fariborz Sahba, based on a lotus flower, [14] and the TWA Flight Center building in New York City, by Eero Saarinen, inspired by the form of a bird’s wing. [15]
One of the leading contemporary architects that uses biomorphism in his work is Basil Al Bayati, a leading proponent of the school of Metaphoric architecture whose designs have been inspired by trees and plants, snails, whales and insects such as the Palm Mosque at the King Saud University in Riyadh, or the Al-Nakhlah Palm Telecommunications Tower, which are based upon the form of a palm tree, [16] or the Oriental Village by the Sea, in the Dominican Republic that is based upon the segmented body of a dragonfly.
Biomorphism is also seen in modern industrial design, such as the work of Alvar Aalto, [17] and Isamu Noguchi, whose Noguchi table is considered an icon of industrial design. [18] Presently, the effect of the influence of nature is less obvious: instead of designed objects looking exactly like the natural form, they use only slight characteristics to remind us of nature.
Victor Papanek (1923–1999) was one of the first American industrial designers to use biomorphic analysis in his design assignments. He reached international prominence while at Purdue University 1964–1970. Student work and his work is illustrated in his book Design for the Real World, published in 1970, which challenges the industrial design establishment to design for the handicapped and disadvantaged throughout the world. First published in 1970 by Bonnier in Swedish, it was published in English in 1971 by Pantheon and eventually translated and published in 23 languages. It is perhaps the most widely read book on design.
Gaetano Pesce is an Italian designer who creates brightly colored acrylic furniture in biomorphic and human shapes. [19] [20] [21]
Marc Newson is an Australian biomorphic designer who created a Charlotte chair (1987) and three-legged carbon-fibre Black Hole table (1988). [22] [23]
Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic of the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art.
Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. He spent the last years of his life as a national of the United States. Along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Gorky has been hailed as one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century. The suffering and loss he experienced in the Armenian genocide had crucial influence at Gorky’s development as an artist.
John Egerton Christmas Piper CH was an English painter, printmaker and designer of stained-glass windows and both opera and theatre sets. His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches and monuments, and included tapestry designs, book jackets, screen-prints, photography, fabrics and ceramics. He was educated at Epsom College and trained at the Richmond School of Art followed by the Royal College of Art in London. He turned from abstraction early in his career, concentrating on a more naturalistic but distinctive approach, but often worked in several different styles throughout his career.
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy, known as just Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.
Katherine Linn Sage, usually known as Kay Sage, was an American Surrealist artist and poet active between 1936 and 1963. A member of the Golden Age and Post-War periods of Surrealism, she is mostly recognized for her artistic works, which typically contain themes of an architectural nature.
Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and printmaker.
John Samuel Tunnard was an English Modernist designer and painter. He was the cousin of landscape architect Christopher Tunnard.
Gaetano Pesce is an Italian architect and a design pioneer of the 20th century. Pesce was born in La Spezia in 1939, and he grew up in Padua and Florence. During his 50-year career, Pesce has worked as an architect, urban planner, and industrial designer. His outlook is considered broad and humanistic, and his work is characterized by an inventive use of color and materials, asserting connections between the individual and society, through art, architecture, and design to reappraise mid-twentieth-century modern life.
The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.
Sterling Ruby is an American artist who works in a large variety of media including ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, video, and textiles. Often, his work is presented in large and densely packed installations. The artist has cited a diverse range of sources and influences including aberrant psychologies, urban gangs and graffiti, hip-hop culture, craft, punk, masculinity, violence, public art, prisons, globalization, American domination and decline, waste and consumption. In opposition to the minimalist artistic tradition and influenced by the ubiquity of urban graffiti, the artist's works often appear scratched, defaced, camouflaged, dirty, or splattered. Proclaimed as one of the most interesting artists to emerge this century by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, Ruby's work examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint. Sterling Ruby currently lives and works in Los Angeles. His studio is located in Vernon, south of downtown Los Angeles.
Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978) was an artist known as one of the founding fathers of Southern California-based hard-edge painting. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Feitelson was raised in New York City, where his family relocated shortly after his birth. His rise to prominence occurred after he moved to California in 1927.
Arturo Herrera is a Venezuelan-born (1959), Berlin-based visual artist known for wide-ranging work that is rooted in the practice of collage. His colorful, often rhythmic art intertwines bits of pop iconography, gestural marks and nonrepresentational shapes using pictorial strategies of fragmentation, repetition, effacement and dislocation. The resulting imagery often balances between abstraction and figuration, detached from inherent narratives yet vaguely familiar. Critics suggest that this ambiguity engages memory, fantasy and a viewer's unconscious private interpretive schemes, evoking a multiplicity of references and readings. In 2020, Art in America writer Ara H. Merjian described Herrera's practice—which includes works on paper, paintings, reliefs, sculpture, public art and books—as "chameleonic as [it] is consistent," one that "breathes life into modernist collage, exploring the tensions between exactitude and spontaneity, placement and displacement."
Organic Abstraction is an artistic style characterized by "the use of rounded or wavy abstract forms based on what one finds in nature." It takes its cues from rhythmic forms found in nature, both small scale, as in the structures of small-growth leaves and stems, and grand, as in the shapes of the universe that are revealed by astronomy and physics. Nautillus shells and honeycombs are examples of organic structures that have served as inspiration for this work, along with the bones and musculature of the body, both human and animal.
Linien was an artists' association in Denmark in the 1930s and 1940s focusing on Abstraction and Symbolism. The group's exhibitions in Copenhagen created wide international participation. After the Second World War, the association was revived as Linien II with an emphasis on Concrete art.
Alice Trumbull Mason (1904–1971) was an American artist, writer, and a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group (AAA) in New York City. Mason was recognized as a pioneer of American Abstraction.
Paul Henry Ramirez is an American contemporary artist known for his biomorphic abstractionist paintings. As his figural based paintings evolved to include geometrics, in 2010, Ramirez coined the term "biogeomorphic abstraction" to describe his own bold painting style, a fusion of biomorphic and geometric forms. He also gained notability for his site-specific installations as his paintings began to expand outside the confines of the canvas edges onto the walls of the gallery space. These site-specific installations gradually evolved to encompass the whole gallery space, creating a full environmental experience. Donald Kuspit, scholar and art critic, describes Ramirez as “an important new kind of abstract painter. .. an abstractionist playing with color and form to exciting imaginative effect.”
Gerrie J. Gutmann, also known as Gerrie Current, Gerrie von Pribosic, Gerrie Bollas (1921–1969) was an American post-surrealist painter from California. The imagery in her paintings was fantasy and often overlapped with autobiographical themes, expressing her struggles for an identity as a woman, an artist, and a mother.
Mária Bartuszová (1936–1996) was a Slovakian sculptor known for her abstract white plaster sculptures. Her work is included in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava and the Tate in London. Her artwork is part of curated selection of Venice Biennale titled "Milk of Dreams", Arsenale Area
Amanda Church is an American artist known for abstract paintings that reference the human figure and other discernible elements. Her works straddle representational and formalist art traditions, suggesting recognizable body parts, objects, and perspectival elements in an otherwise abstract field. Church's distinctive use of contrasting style elements has been consistently noted by critics such as Hyperallergic's Cora Fisher, who described Church's work as "whimsically overruling the left-right brain dichotomy as well as the traditionally gendered axis that divides geometric and decorative art." Church received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017, among other awards. Her work has been covered in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, ARTnews, Hyperallergic and Forbes Magazine. Her paintings have been exhibited in major U.S. cities as well as internationally, in galleries and museums such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Aldrich Museum. She lives and works in New York.
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