There’s a moment in most illusions that’s called the reveal, an intentional twist that surprises the viewer, plays with their mind and changes their frame of reference forever.
Edgar Rubin’s vase image is one of the most famous, a figure-ground exercise that shows a vase and opposing faces in profile. You can only see one at a time but once you’ve seen both, your eyes switch constantly and involuntarily between the two.
Renaissance artists such as Piero della Francesca played even subtler games with shadows in paintings such as The Flagellation of Christ, including multiple and contradictory light sources in their paintings to suggest the simultaneous presence of the natural and the divine.
Both techniques and more are on display in On Site, the inaugural exhibition at the new New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery on Saadiyat.
The show is ostensibly about landscape and the built environment and the relationship between the natural and the man-made, but a closer inspection reveals a series of works that use these categories to ask more profound questions about how we see, what we see and the role of culture in both.
Original article by Nick Leech
Continue reading at The National:
New NYUAD Art Gallery will challenge our perceptions of art
Comments
Facebook
Twitter
Contact
Elan.tv
Comments