Colour, space, composition : painting in the expanded field

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 andwhich combine painting with installation and assemblage, exploring ideas and problems that relate to abstraction, suchas figure/ground composition and the use of colour as a spatial element. In the written component, I examine thediscourse about this newly recognised area of contemporary practice termed 'expanded painting', defined as a genre bythe Danish art historian Anne Ring Petersen as including objects, installations or architectural designs as a form ofpainting.The aim and the focus of the written dissertation, is to demonstrate that the spatialisation of painting, which has becomea common aspect of contemporary practice, as demonstrated by artists such as Jessica Stockholder and myself, is thecontinuation and realisation of certain ideas that were developed and explored during two key moments of the twentiethcentury in relation to painting and to abstraction. The first moment was during the early decades of the century and wasinitiated by foundational abstract painters such as Piet Mondrian, who foretold paintings current evolution as anexpanded field and who argued that in the future painting would exceed its two-dimensional support and would mergewith 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 withthe legacy of modernism, abandoned easel painting and the formalist values that were associated with the genre at thetime, and turned instead to sculpture and installation as a way of expanding their practice. This argument extends thecurrent literature on expanded painting in two ways. Firstly, by linking the contemporary development of painting as aspatialised practice to the theories of Mondrian, a connection that has not yet been acknowledged and secondly, bybringing new insight to the work of two artists whose work is a historical example of spatialised painting, but whoseconnection to expanded painting has thus far remained unexplored.This argument is vitally informed by my own art practice