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January 18th, 2025
Stripe paintings, defined by their repetitive linear bands or stripes, have long been a visual and conceptual cornerstone in art. Their simplicity masks a rich history, engaging deeply with the concept and challenges of geometry, spatial perception, colour theory, and artistic intentionality. In the last century, stripe paintings have evolved, becoming a significant form in art, influencing movements from modernism to minimalism and beyond.
The origins of stripe paintings can be traced to human’s earliest decorative practices. Linear motifs appeared in ancient textiles, pottery, and architectural friezes, reflecting a universal attraction to rhythm, repetition, and order. The deliberate use of stripes as a dominant compositional element emerged significantly in the 20th century, influenced by modernist reductions of form and a growing emphasis on abstraction.
In the early 1900s, movements like Cubism and Futurism encouraged artists to deconstruct form and play with spatial relationships. While not strictly stripe paintings, works by Piet Mondrian anticipated this approach. Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930) reveals a fascination with linear segmentation, its rhythmic balance and dynamic geometry foreshadowing the later emphasis on stripes in abstract art.
Bridget Riley's 'Cataract' series, created for the 1968 Venice Biennale where she won the International Prize for Painting, marked a vital evolution in her use of colour. Cataract 3 features coloured stripes on a white canvas, highlighting hue interactions and suggesting movement akin to light or water flow. The work contrasts with the fixed vision loss of an ophthalmological cataract by offering dynamic visual experiences through chromatic contrasts and rhythmic patterns. Influenced by artists like Monet and Cézanne, Riley emphasized visual surprise, employing assistants for a smooth finish while focusing on perceptual engagement. Her method balances ordered preparation with a free, vibrant result.
Stripe paintings profoundly affect the viewer by structuring visual experience. The linear format creates a rhythmic flow, guiding the eye across the surface with a sense of movement akin to music. For instance, Barnett Newman’s zip paintings may invite a meditative stillness, while Bridget Riley’s vibrating stripes often disorient and challenge optical and spatial perception. The effect of stripes is not solely optical but also emotional, as the repetition and balance often create calm or dynamic energy.
This relationship between simplicity and complexity enhances viewer engagement. The tension within the uniformity of stripes, between order and variation, keeps the eye moving and the mind engaged, fostering prolonged contemplation.
The creation of stripe paintings is as much about intentionality as it is about execution. While artists like Frank Stella emphasised precision, allowing mechanical regularity to dominate, others, like Sean Scully, embraced a more tactile, painterly approach that conveys emotional resonance through visible imperfections. These imperfections, whether in the form of uneven edges, variations in brushstrokes, or subtle inconsistencies in spacing, bear the unmistakable trace of the artist’s hand. In Scully’s works, for example, the softness of his lines and the layered application of paint create a sense of intimacy and humanity, drawing close, for the viewers, the relationship between artist and material. This contrasts sharply with Stella’s, or even Riley’s clinical precision, where the uniformity of the stripes removes the subjective mark of the artist in favour of an autonomous formalism.
The individuality of a stripe painting often becomes immediately recognizable through the artist’s distinct use of colour and composition. For instance, Agnes Martin’s grids and stripes are defined by their muted palettes and subtle tonal variations, evoking serenity and introspection. Her meticulous craftsmanship, combined with the delicacy of her drawn lines, creates an almost meditative quality. On the other hand, Gene Davis’s vivid and contrasting stripes arranged in rhythmic sequences often generate a sense of playfulness and vibrancy, allowing his works to radiate energy.
Agnes Martin’s work transcend their apparent simplicity through a painstaking process of layering and refinement, where each line is imbued with intentionality and a sense of conviction. Her lines, while straight, are not mechanical, as their faint irregularities draw the viewer into the intimacy of her process, where subtle imperfections act as traces of human presence.
In an oddly similar way, Daniel Buren’s deliberate deployment of stripes not only reflects conceptual rigour but also invites viewers to question the institutional and spatial contexts in which the work exists. His stripes, often presented in public or site-specific installations, gain meaning through their interaction with their environment, challenging conventional ideas about art’s place and function.
Les Deux Plateaux, more commonly known as the Colonnes de Buren, is an art installation created by the French artist Daniel Buren in 1985–1986. It is located in the inner courtyard (Cour d'Honneur) of the Palais Royal in Paris, France.
Stripe paintings occupy a crucial position in art history, bridging modernism’s emphasis on reduction with postmodernism’s interrogation of perception and context. Their adaptability allowed them to influence diverse movements, from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism and Op Art. The reductive geometry of stripe paintings aligns with modernism’s quest for purity, while their optical effects resonate with postmodern explorations of viewer interaction.
Beyond aesthetics, stripe paintings challenge the traditional hierarchies of art and design by deliberately navigating the space between functional simplicity and high conceptual thought. Their reliance on formal simplicity invites comparisons with decorative arts, challenging conventional distinctions and redefining the scope of artistic discourse.
This blurring of boundaries positions stripe paintings not merely as autonomous artworks but also as reflections of cultural, historical, and philosophical contexts. The precision or imperfection of their linear forms highlights the tension between craftsmanship and mechanical repetition, drawing attention to the artist’s intentionality in balancing the visual appeal of pattern with deeper conceptual undertones.
Stripe paintings emphasise materiality and process, engaging with profound philosophical questions about the essence of painting. By distilling visual elements to their most fundamental components—colour, line, and rhythm, stripe paintings put emphasis on the flatness of the canvas and the importance of its autonomy as an object. At the same time, the repetitive and often meditative process of creating stripes resonates with broader themes in contemporary art of temporality, labour, and human presence.
“To make this work, Herrera painted vertical bands of black and white at varying lengths and with diagonal breaks that create a two-tone zigzag pattern. She extended her pattern to the face and sides of the frame, giving the object a sense of dynamic totality. 'I began a lifelong process of purification, a process of taking away what isn't essential,’ she explained. Although active in Paris and New York from the late 1940s on, she did not sell a painting until 2004, at the age of eighty-nine. She has recalled that one dealer bluntly told her, ‘You can paint circles around the male artists that I have, but I'm not going to give you a show because you're a woman.’”
— Gallery label from Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction,
April 19 - August 13, 2017
We are proud to announce our upcoming exhibition
JACK BUSH: FLAUNTING THE RULES
Opening: Saturday, February 1st, 2025
1:00 - 5:30 PM
Catalogue available, with essay by Roald Nasgaard
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Contact: Farzina Coladon