Following a series of compelling, museum-quality presentations such as Zero – Gutai – Kusama in 2015, The Colony Room: Masterpieces from Pallant House Gallery in 2016, and a major Richard Lin retrospective (which later travelled to Hong Kong) in 2018, Bonhams London will present Surfaces at its flagship New Bond Street location in June 2019.

A celebration of artists who transcended the two-dimensional format and its limitations, Surfaces will bring together members of the avant-garde from around the globe united by a shared ambition: to liberate painting from the surface. Arguably one of post-war art history's greatest achievements, this practice of working in a three-dimensional format has been used in both hemispheres either with the aim of reaching new spiritual heights through purity or in pursuit of a formalist ambition by stripping painting back to its bare essentials and refocusing the beholder's attention on its fundamental elements.

A carefully curated selection of works emanating from these investigations will be presented in Surfaces across two very broad and sometimes overlapping categories: minimalist, often monochromatic reliefs; and gestural abstraction highlighting the build-up of matter on the support. From the three-dimensional constructions of artists associated with movements such as the ZERO group using non-traditional media to bring light and shadow into play, to the raw materialisation of primal creative energy unleashed onto the canvas by artists such as Shozo Shimamoto in Japan or Pierre Soulages in France, to the meditations of Korea's post-war artists on matter and space, this truly global shift marked art history and is still relevant to this day.

London, New Bond Street

Exhibition times:

22 June 2019, 11.00 BST - 17.00 BST
23 June 2019, 11.00 BST - 17.00 BST
24 June 2019, 09.00 BST - 16.00 BST
25 June 2019, 09.00 BST - 17.00 BST
26 June 2019, 09.00 BST - 17.00 BST
27 June 2019, 09.00 BST - 14.00 BST