SPEND A PRETTY PENNY

Today, we're off to the loo again!

Sheila recently alerted me to another Mondrianesque convenience, this time in KawaKawa, Bay of Islands, New Zealand...


The decision to ignore the formality and rigidity of Mondrian's grid-locked art is a clue to the fact that this is the work of the free-thinking, free-wheeling, Austrian artist and architect, Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) who - with a wonderful disregard for the usefulness of spirit-level and plumb-line - created some of the world's most fantastical buildings.

Move over Gaudi! These are something else...












Here's more information about...

The KawaKawa Public Toilets

Hundertwasser life and career

Hundertwasser's work
(Click on 'The Oeuvre' for his architecture)

TAKING THE MONDRIAN

In my last post, I showed the work of a NHS loo-tiler in the school of Dutch artist, Pieter Mondrian whose iconic grid paintings were part of an 'art-ism' that he termed Neo-Plasticism. If you've ever wondered what Mondrian was getting at with his abstract compositions, here's how he described his artistic aims in a letter from 1917:

I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true...

As with all great art, Mondrian's paintings have inspired a variety of pastiches and parodies of which the best is unquestionably Mick Haggerty's 1976 composition, Mickey Mondrian...


You can explore the amazing and diverting graphic worlds of Mick Haggerty here

IN LIEU OF ART

AMAZING ART REVELATION!

Just discovered:
indisputable evidence of Mondrian's bog-standard day-job

Image: Art installation in Gent's Lavatory, St Thomas' Hospital, Westminster, London. Photo courtesy of David Weeks.