The McMaster Museum of Art presents:

THE RULES OF ITS FUNCTIONING, SYSTEMS WORKS, 1946-2011

16 April – 13 August 2016

This selection of sculpture, painting and photography from the McMaster Museum of Art collection offers a view into constructivist and structuralist practices and its continuing legacies and affinities. Dr. Willy Rotzler, curator and author of the 1977 book Constructivist Concepts: A History of Constructive Art from Cubism to the Present, wrote that geometric form is “a fundamental experience” that has its foundation at the beginning of art—how visual languages were formed in order to know the world before the mimetic description of what is seen.

The exhibition Includes McMaster collection works by:

Naum Gabo (Russian-English)
Yves Gaucher (Canadian)
Jean Gorin (French)
Ron Kostyniuk (Calgary) recent acquisition
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian)
Kenneth Noland (American)
Liss Platt (Canadian, b. USA) recent acquisition
Bridget Riley (English)
and on loan from the Art Gallery of Hamilton, François Morellet.

The exhibition title is derived from Roland Barthes’s 1964 essay “The Structuralist Activity”:

“The goal of all structuralist activity, whether reflexive or poetic, is to recon­struct an ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning (the ‘functions’) of this object.”