Books by Lynn Gamwell
Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual - Second Edition
by Lynn Gamwell
This sumptuous and stunningly illustrated book shows through words and images how directly, profoundly, and indisputably modern science has transformed modern art.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a strange and exciting new world came into focus--a world of microorganisms in myriad shapes and colors, prehistoric fossils, bizarre undersea creatures, spectrums of light and sound, molecules of water, and atomic particles. Exploring the Invisible reveals that the world beyond the naked eye--made visible by advances in science--has been a major inspiration for artists ever since, influencing the subjects they choose as well as their techniques and modes of representation.
Lynn Gamwell traces the evolution of abstract art through several waves, beginning with Romanticism. She shows how new windows into telescopic and microscopic realms--combined with the growing explanatory importance of mathematics and new definitions of beauty derived from science--broadly and profoundly influenced Western art. Art increasingly reflected our more complex understanding of reality through increasing abstraction. For example, a German physiologist's famous demonstration that color is not in the world but in the mind influenced Monet's revolutionary painting with light. As the first wave of enthusiasm for science crested, abstract art emerged in Brussels and Munich. By 1914, it could be found from Moscow to Paris.
Throughout the book are beautiful images from both science and art--some well known, others rare--that reveal the scientific sources mined by Impressionist and Symbolist painters, Art Nouveau sculptors and architects, Cubists, and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists.
With a foreword by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, Exploring the Invisible appears in an age when both artists and scientists are exploring the deepest meanings of life, consciousness, and the universe.
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Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates
by Klaus Ottmann, Dan Mills, Lynn Gamwell, Timothy Morton, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Emma Enderby, Agnes Denes, Giampaolo Bianconi, Renee Gladman, Caroline Jones, Lucy R. Lippard
"Agnes Denes, the queen of land art, made one of New York’s greatest public art projects ever in 1982. Now, the world might be catching up with her." –Karrie Jacobs, New York Times
Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates accompanies the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in New York to date, held at The Shed in fall 2019 as part of the arts space’s opening season. Presenting more than 130 works, this comprehensive publication, presented in an embossed slipcase, spans the 50-year career of the path-breaking artist dubbed “the queen of land art” by the New York Times, famed for her iconic Wheatfield―A Confrontation (1982), for which she planted a two-acre wheatfield in Lower Manhattan on the Battery Park Landfill, in the shadow of the then recently erected Twin Towers.
A major undertaking, this superb catalog includes a comprehensive text by the exhibition’s curator, Emma Enderby, an interview with Denes by Hans Ulrich Obrist, essays by prominent scholars and curators including Caroline A. Jones, Lucy R. Lippard and Timothy Morton that examine Denes’ multifaceted practice in new ways, writings by the artist and reflections by curators who have worked with Denes over the course of her career. New works by Denes commissioned by The Shed for the exhibition are presented in a special insert.
Budapest-born, New York–based artist Agnes Denes (born 1931) rose to international attention in the 1960s and 1970s as a leading figure in conceptual, environmental and ecological art. A pioneer of several art genres, she has created work in many mediums, utilizing various disciplines―such as science, philosophy, linguistics, ecology and psychology―to analyze, document and ultimately aid humanity.
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Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual – Revised and Expanded Edition
by Lynn Gamwell
How science changed the way artists understand reality
Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan.
Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects―radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism―abstract, non-objective art―to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful.
With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.
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Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History
by Lynn Gamwell
A cultural history of the links between mathematics and art, from antiquity to today
This is a cultural history of mathematics and art, from antiquity to the present. Mathematicians and artists have long been on a quest to understand the physical world they see before them and the abstract objects they know by thought alone. Taking readers on a tour of the practice of mathematics and the philosophical ideas that drive the discipline, Lynn Gamwell points out the important ways mathematical concepts have been expressed by artists. Sumptuous illustrations of artworks and cogent math diagrams are featured in Gamwell's comprehensive exploration.
Gamwell begins by describing mathematics from antiquity to the Enlightenment, including Greek, Islamic, and Asian mathematics. Then focusing on modern culture, Gamwell traces mathematicians' search for the foundations of their science, such as David Hilbert's conception of mathematics as an arrangement of meaning-free signs, as well as artists' search for the essence of their craft, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's monochrome paintings. She shows that self-reflection is inherent to the practice of both modern mathematics and art, and that this introspection points to a deep resonance between the two fields: Kurt Gödel posed questions about the nature of mathematics in the language of mathematics and Jasper Johns asked "What is art?" in the vocabulary of art. Throughout, Gamwell describes the personalities and cultural environments of a multitude of mathematicians and artists, from Gottlob Frege and Benoît Mandelbrot to Max Bill and Xu Bing.
Mathematics and Art demonstrates how mathematical ideas are embodied in the visual arts and will enlighten all who are interested in the complex intellectual pursuits, personalities, and cultural settings that connect these vast disciplines.
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