by A big slobby lump of congealed black polyurethane foam shrinks in a corner, its poured content caught in mid-flow. There is something irreducible about Lynda Benglis’ Untitled (Köln) 1970; it has a finality, art reduced to gravity and chemistry and informality.
The sculpture comes towards the end of Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction 1950-70, which fills the galleries at Turner Contemporary. Before we reach Benglis, we have taken a tour of post-war art, from the hurried lines and dots, smudges and scribbles of the Indian artist Arpita Singh, like mad glossolalia, and the intense, cool, systematic art of Gillian Wise and Mary Martin, with their planes non-folding, its Perspex mirrors and rectangles, its logic and rigorous mathematically derived constructions.
We encountered a bulging wall of woven threads by Sheila Hicks and a spiky bronze relief called Katmandu by Dorothy Dehner, a work so 1950s-era I feel like I’ve gone back to my childhood. Something like a vase or a torso with unspeakable wounds and bits chewed off by shrapnel and a single glazed eye staring back at me, in a terracotta sculpture by Czech artist Daniela Vinopalová, with an anxious nest of phallic balls poking out of their foreskin. in latex and plaster sculpture by Louise Bourgeois.
The title belies the ambition and scope of an exhibition that stretches into the 70s, and includes body parts, formal rigor and strangeness, mathematics, politics, the woven, painted, cast, built, handmade and machined. helped. The lines of abstraction go every which way. As curator Flavia Frigeri says, there is no such thing as pure form. All the work here was done by women, many of whom were marginalized or even excluded from an art world that was predominantly male, white and straight, and during a period when feminism was in slow motion. Their works were often denatured as craft or interior decoration in the west and the Soviet bloc – which also gave female artists a certain freedom from the ideological constraints that governed and conditioned artistic production in eastern Europe and the Union Soviet. regarding it as art at all.
Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová made sculptures that were used as teaching aids for visually impaired children, to help their sensory awareness. She often worked with balloons filled with liquid plaster, which allowed gravity to dictate her forms. One here is like one giant raindrop in plaster, hanging from the ceiling like a weight on a plumb line. Nearby, a thin rubber tube drops to the floor from a lumpy black disc set in a black square hanging on the wall. When it hits the ground, the tube seems to have a purpose, like an insect’s proboscis, in one of two works by Eva Hesse. Always good to see Hesse. In the second work, the discs are multiplied and resemble a breast, and instead of rubber, coils of gray rope on the floor. Do we need to know what this is? Does it have to be anything other than itself?
Like spaghetti, a spotlight tangle of blue, yellow and silver aluminum tubing is in another corner. Claire Falkenstein’s chain, made some time in the 1960s, twirls and pirouettes. In addition to drawing and sculpture, the LA-based artist’s work is as fluid and abstract as string theory. Nearby, Brazilian Lygia Clark’s hinged shapes of sheet metal fold and open under glass on their plinths. The audience was meant to handle Clark’s Bichos, their shapes always in flux and with no final form. Interacting with her work was meant to be therapeutic in some way. Now they are inert under glass and cannot be handled.
A 1965 canvas by Agnes Martin, covered with a grid drawn in thin red coloring pencil, overdrawn with graphite pencil lines, all but invisible behind glass. The whole thing should be hum, but the whole delicate, evanescent effect, made with very limited self-imposed means, (which is the whole point of Martin’s work) is completely lost to the surrounding reflections. But that’s exhibitionism for you. Curators, like artists, must work with what is available and what is possible.
Marisa Merz worked in the kitchen on her monstrous, unwieldy Untitled 1966 (Living Sculpture), whose aluminum pipes are now bashed-under-pressure and twist and dangle from the ceiling like a steak in a butcher’s shop. She fashioned the tubes from aluminum strips, cut and bent and stapled together on her kitchen table. The object (what else could it be?) was eventually suspended above the table, and later drifted from the ceiling of a local disco. Fabulous and grim, and sticky with accumulated residue, cooking accidents, and nightclub smoke, it now belongs to Tate, to be worried about the curators. The sculpture’s everyday origins give it a certain grandeur – and looking up, you don’t see the astronauts or the grime.
One of the greatest delights here is the variety of approaches to material and its handling. As diverse and broad as the show is, it can accommodate Merz and Barbara Hepworth, Benglis and Elizabeth Frink, sisal and wire and gunka and bronze, weaving and glass and any kind of opposing approach. The accuracy with which Bridget Riley made her early periods with back grids and blanks, and how precisely Martin and Wise made their mathematically derived constructions and reliefs could be seen as contradicting the five Statues Androgynous and Vaginal by Hannah Wilke, with her indeterminate terracotta. forms that look like they were molded in the palm of his hand.
Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa’s hanging form of crocheted loops of brass wire feels as if it grew organically rather than being made, while Italian artist Carla Accardi used clear plastic packaging material, which she stapled to a canvas and covered with haste, rhythmic marks in black varnish, the wooden stretcher is left visible behind the repeated strokes of the varnish. As long as you look at it, you can see how Accardi’s work was done, from the inside to the outside. One thing leads to another here, and another and another. It keeps coming, against the odds.
• Beyond Form: Abstract Lines, 1950-1970 is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 6 May
