Agnes Denes: Fragmentations
This exhibition highlights Fragmentations, a series of etchings by conceptual artist Agnes Denes. Created in response to the socio-political climate of the late twentieth century, these works reflect Denes’s drive to forge new aesthetic forms that speak to humanity’s evolving relationship with the environment. Grounded in geometry and pattern, the series presents a worldview rendered through the universal language of numbers.
Denes explains that she uses “fragmentations and distortions [to see] things from a multitude of perspectives, in space as well as in concepts, yet even then, the images are ‘perfect’ because they are based on mathematics.” For her, these etchings witness “the birth of form,” guided by the underlying principles of design that shape our world. The mathematical equations used to generate each image give rise to structures we recognize—spheres, pyramids, spirals—yet Denes suggests that other unknown patterns could “hold the key to unresolved enigmas and paradoxes,” opening the door to a deeper understanding of the universe.
Born in Budapest in 1931, raised in Sweden, and later educated in the United States, Denes began exhibiting her work in the early 1960s. She is known for groundbreaking ecological land artworks, including Tree Mountain, a living monument in Finland, and Wheatfield—A Confrontation, a two-acre wheat field planted in the heart of Manhattan before the development of Battery Park and the Financial Center.
A complementary installation drawn from the UK Art Museum's permanent collection will be presented in tandem with Denes's series, highlighting the role of mathematical and geometric frameworks across multiple facets of abstract art.
This exhibition was organized in collaboration with Bryce Chatwin, a graduate student in the School of Art and Visual Studies' Curatorial Studies program at the University of Kentucky.
Image Credit: Agnes Denes, Untitled from Fragmentations, 1998, etching on paper. Collection of the UK Art Museum, gift of Werner H. Kramarsky.
