insideKENT Magazine Issue 27 - June 2014 | Page 112

COVERSTORY
© Carlos Dominquez

THE WORLD-CLASS

Turner Contemporary
The Kent-based gallery Turner Contemporary is a dynamic
visual arts organisation that is creating an explosion of
colour in Margate this summer.
Mondrian and Colour
24 May – 21 September 2014
This summer, Margate will be
awash with colour as Turner
Contemporary brings works by the
leading twentieth-century artist, Piet
Mondrian, to the seaside town.

that Mondrian’s abstract works
were not simply mathematical
exercises in form, but that they also
expressed his search for a new
universal harmony.

Piet Mondrian changed painting. In
the early twentieth-century, the
Dutch artist moved from depicting
reality to pioneering something
completely new and controversial:
abstraction.

Mondrian the artist
Mondrian was born in 1872 and
died in 1944, when World War II
was still raging. This period bore
witness to the seismic impact of
two World Wars, and saw massive
social and technological change.

His most famous works, the ‘grids’,
use simple lines and the primary
colours red, yellow and blue to
create a universal harmony,
separating colour and subject from
reality, and transforming the
materialworld into something
spiritual.
70 years after Mondrian’s death,
Turner Contemporary invites visitors
to get beneath the grid and trace
Mondrian’s journey to abstraction
through colour, in the first major
exhibition to consider the
significance of colour during
Mondrian’s career, from figuration
to early abstraction.
Bringing together around 50
paintings by the artist from the
Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, and
other collections in Europe and the
USA, the exhibition demonstrates

He was at the forefront of
Modernism, a movement that
asserted the power of people to
improve their environment,
supported by advanced scientific
knowledge and technology.
Celebrating the present, modernism
included the works of those who
rebelled against late 19th-century
traditions, and confronted the new
economic, social and political
aspects of the nascent modern
world. Living through overwhelming
changes in society, struggling to
earn a living and carving out a
unique creative path, Mondrian
demonstrated enormous resilience,
confidence, vision and strength of
character.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)
Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue, 1921.
Oil on canvas, 95.7 x 95.1 cm.
Collection Gemeentemuseum Den