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The representation of cosmic or infinite space has been a recurring feature of art since the first decades of the twentieth century. Vasily Kandinsky's nonobjective paintings manifest his belief in the spiritual properties of various shapes and colors, particularly the circle, the form he believed most clearly pointed to the fourth dimension. With its harmonious composition of repeating, floating circles, Kandinsky’s Several Circles (1926) conjures a limitless cosmos. Piet Mondrian’s gridded compositions of black horizontal and vertical lines framing blocks of off-white or primary colors, although resolutely planar, imply an infinite extension into space beyond the material borders of the canvas. Hiroshi Sugimoto employs the medium of photography to summon an image of unity and infinity; in Sea of Buddha (1994) from his series Sanjusangendo, Hall of Thirty-Three Bays, he presents a vast, kaleidoscopic view of the repeating, nearly identical, life-size statues of the Bodhisattva Kannon in a twelth century shrine in Kyoto, Japan. A similar limitless field with endlessly repeating forms appears in Paul Pfeiffer's mesmerizing video Pier and Ocean (2004), which digitally overlays footage of individual passenger planes to create the illusion of an ever-increasing number of jets converging at a single point in the sky and peacefully passing through one another. Despite the implicit threat of violence and foreboding that it creates, Pier and Ocean presents a transfixing and transcendental image of vast, limitless, pure blue space—an apt metaphor for the open conception of The Shapes of Space overall. |
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