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Abstract
This Ph D explores the advent of painting as a three-dimensional, expanded and spatialised practice.
The studio component has resulted in the creation of new artworks, which I refer to as colour-space compositions and
which combine painting with installation and assemblage, exploring ideas and problems that relate to abstraction, such
as figure/ground composition and the use of colour as a spatial element. In the written component, I examine the
discourse about this newly recognised area of contemporary practice termed 'expanded painting', defined as a genre by
the Danish art historian Anne Ring Petersen as including objects, installations or architectural designs as a form of
painting.
The aim and the focus of the written dissertation, is to demonstrate that the spatialisation of painting, which has become
a common aspect of contemporary practice, as demonstrated by artists such as Jessica Stockholder and myself, is the
continuation and realisation of certain ideas that were developed and explored during two key moments of the twentieth
century in relation to painting and to abstraction. The first moment was during the early decades of the century and was
initiated by foundational abstract painters such as Piet Mondrian, who foretold painting s current evolution as an
expanded field and who argued that in the future painting would exceed its two-dimensional support and would merge
with architecture to become a three-dimensional practice. The second moment was during the mid and late 1960s,
when artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Daniel Buren, who during their early careers worked with abstraction and with
the legacy of modernism, abandoned easel painting and the formalist values that were associated with the genre at the
time, and turned instead to sculpture and installation as a way of expanding their practice. This argument extends the
current literature on expanded painting in two ways. Firstly, by linking the contemporary development of painting as a
spatialised practice to the theories of Mondrian, a connection that has not yet been acknowledged and secondly, by
bringing new insight to the work of two artists whose work is a historical example of spatialised painting, but whose
connection to expanded painting has thus far remained unexplored.
This argument is vitally informed by my own art practice.