Kunsthalle Praha

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Kinetismus

The Greek verb kineo (to move) appears in both kinematography and kinetics. Cinema is the art of the illusion of movement – kineticism is the art of real movement. In many cases artists worked in both fields: such as Marcel Duchamp, Len Lye and others. Subsequently kineticism became part of the vocabulary of art history.

100 Years of Electricity in Art

It was in the 1920’s that the word kinetic was first used in connection with the plastic arts. Naum Gabo and his brother, Antoine Pevsner, spoke of kinetic rhythms in their Realist Manifesto in 1920.

Zdeněk Pešánek referred to his works as kinetic and wrote a book called Kineticism in the 1920’s, which was published in 1941.

Kinetic art (kineticism) evolved to a worldwide art movement from the second half of the 1950’s, with its centre in Paris, and became very popular through figures duch as Jean Tinguely.

Text: Kunsthalle Praha 2022

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