The rest were casualties of 20th-century Central European history: some were discarded by the Germans who commandeered Kobro’s Łódź apartment after the artist and her family fled following the Nazi invasion of the city in 1939 others, Kobro burned after running out of firewood during the brutal winter of 1945. ©Ewa Sapka-Pawliczak and Muzeum Sztuki, Łódźįewer than 20 of Kobro’s sculptures are still extant, supplemented by a handful of posthumous reconstructions made by art historian and curator Janusz Zagrodzki and Kobro’s former student Bolesław Utkin between 19. Katarzyna Kobro: Spatial Composition 5, 1929–30, painted steel, 9¾ by 25 by 15¾ inches.
That institution, cofounded by the artist and her husband, the painter Władysław Strzemiński, in 1931-making it the second-oldest modern art museum in the world, after MoMA itself-has long served as the primary repository for the couple’s works. Spatial Composition 5 is, however, not part of MoMA’s collection at all, but a five-year loan from Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland. More recently, in early 2022, it anchored an arrangement of works at MoMA titled “Katarzyna Kobro: Shaping Space,” an intergenerational survey of geometric abstraction including works by Kobro’s colleagues and contemporaries (Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, László Moholy-Nagy) as well as postwar artists like Donald Judd, Lygia Clark, and Ulrike Müller. When the Museum of Modern Art in New York reopened in 2019, Spatial Composition 5 was among the works given new prominence in its dramatically overhauled collection galleries. It doesn’t merely occupy space, it defines it, giving it a kind of palpable presence of its own. The sculpture isn’t a static arrangement of geometric forms so much as a changeable sequence of distinct views and spatial relationships made possible by the viewer’s perambulations. Look from a different angle, and you will see something else entirely: a flat vertical rectangle that gives way to an openwork cube, delineated by two irregular planes that meet at a right angle, echoed by a zigzagging shadow below. (The first time I saw this work in person, I mistook one particularly sharp-edged shadow for gray paint.) Yet this description is in many respects misleading, or at least very partial. But the work also incorporates another, more fugitive set of forms: the geometric shadows cast by the sculpture’s components on the surrounding surfaces, thereby extending and augmenting the sculpture’s planar structure so convincingly that it’s difficult to tell at a glance where the metal begins and ends.
0 kommentar(er)
