Alex Duncan

A little sneak peek of some smaller works in my show coming to in April.

Last year I became fixated on Theo van Doesburg’s manifesto, Principles of Neo-Plastic Art, and started playing around with the strict rules of the movement, which was really more of a group than a movement. Long story short: the aim of neoplasticism (also called De Stijl, the style in Dutch) is to express ideas using pure logic by breaking down art to its purest forms and colors. So what’s the mean?

The Rules:
* Primary colors, black, white, and greyscale are your palette
* Horizontal and vertical lines only (after van Doesberg suggested that diagonal lines may be more important than horizontal and vertical lines, Mondrian was like boy you crazy bye and they had beef from then on out)
* Leave your frilly impressionistic feelings at the door, this is about 1920’s post-war Dutch logic and reason (which seems like a trauma response, desperately seeking control after the senseless brutality of WWI, but what do I know)

Not surprisingly, I disagree with the neo-plastic boys on a few things, and I’ve been exploring that in these pieces. But we’ll get into that later. I’m an art historian at heart, so I’m really struggling to not turn this caption into an essay, and you’ve been generous enough with your attention span already

If you can, I’d love to see you all at the reception April 6th 7-9pm!