Kandinsky's Universe: Geometric Abstractions in the 20th Century

Exhibition at the Museum Barberini, Potsdam, 15 February - 18 May 2025

At the beginning of the twentieth century, artists no longer wanted to represent the visible, but aspired to a new visual language that reduced artistic expression to a play of colours, lines and shapes, reflected the modern world and transcended national borders. One of the central figures in this artistic movement was Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who laid the theoretical foundations with his work Point and Line to Plane.

This exhibition catalogue shows how geometric abstraction found radical expression in all its variations in Europe, the United States and beyond. It presents over one hundred works by more than seventy artists, including Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Barbara Hepworth, El Lissitzky, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella and Victor Vasarely. Specialist essays highlight how these artists were inspired by the advanced technologies and theories of their time, including the concepts of the fourth dimension and the space-time continuum.