Supports/Surfaces

Supports/Surfaces, the last avant-garde of Western art? Perhaps. Unlike other advanced movements since abstraction, Supports/Surfaces neither proposed nor announced the « end of art ». These artists aspired not so much to return to a primitive literalism as to find recourse, at modernisms end, in the constitutive principles of the work of art. This intent conducted them to articulate their practice around theoretical reflections that beat comparison with contemporaneous movements such as Minimal art, Arte Povera or Mono-Ha. As one of the major movements of the 60s and 70s in France, on the cusp between modernity and postmodernity, Supports/Surfaces has not receded into history but rather offers a fascinating example to younger artists the world over.