Art & Photography: Adventures of the Black Square

Peter Halley, Auto Zone, 1992

Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015 is at Whitechapel Gallery until 6 April 2015.
Last year Tate Modern presented a fascinating show of the work of Kazimir Malevich, creator of the revolutionary Black Square in 1915 (see below). Now Whitechapel Gallery is showing an ambitious exploration of the story of abstraction as it evolved through the following 100 years in the work of some 100 artists.
The exhibition follows 4 themes: Utopia, Architectonics, Communication, and the Everyday and charts the life of geometric abstraction through painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design and textiles, from Russia to the USA, from Europe to Asia and Latin America, from revolutionary politics to corporate capitalism, from the spiritual to the material. It promises to be a rich and fascinating story. (I was fascinated to learn from Adrian Searle's review that Amalia Pica's Memorial for intersections #2 (see image, below) refers to the banning of the use of Venn Diagrams in primary schools in Argentina in the 1970s - on the grounds that they were believed to encourage subversive thought!?)
Read reviews by Adrian Searle, Laura Cumming, Waldemar Januszczak, Jackie Wullschlager, J J Charlesworth, Louisa Buck and Charley Peters and an article by Frances Spalding. See also, below, for information about the complementary exhibition: David Batchelor: Monochrome Archive, 1997-2015.