Exhibition gets to the art of science

Geometry!

The correlation between science and art is the focus of a fascinating new exhibition at Cambridge University’s Kettle’s Yard.

‘Beyond Measure: conversations across art and science’ opens tomorrow (Saturday, April 5) and runs until June 1.

It explores how geometry – often a word to strike fear into people – is used by artists and astronomers, engineers, surgeons, architects, physicists and mathematicians, among others, as a means to explain and order the world around us.

Both Picasso and Duchamp made important work by exploring the latest theories behind the subject. When Einstein published his general Theory of Relativity in 1915, the fourth dimension became a key theme in Cubist, Futurist and Vorticist art. It is their legacy that is explored in the exhibition by artists such as Richard Deacon.

Built around a series of workshops, talks and discussions, Beyond Measure will encourage people to engage with geometry, drawing parallels between the artist’s studio and the laboratory.

The Kettle’s Yard exhibition features the dividers used by Sir Christopher Wren while he worked on St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as virus structure models produced by Nobel Prize winning biophysicist Professor Sir Aaron Klug.

The conic ellipses of astronomer Robin Catchpole and Professor Sir Roger Penrose’s geometrical explorations of the mathematical foundations of the universe will also be on display along with paintings by Iranian-born painter Nader Ahriman, British artist Peter Peri and works by the iconic Richard Hamilton.

Objects until now unseen by the general public include the first working model of a hyperbolic surface crocheted by mathematician Dania Taimina.

Curator Barry Phipps, Kettle Yard’s first Inter-disciplinary Fellow, said: “As the theme of the show suggests, geometry, which began as a tool to measure the Earth, has since become fundamental to generating and mapping new terrains of science. It is also a question for artists about our engagement with a calculated world.”

For details of exhibition events including gallery talks and workshops etc, click on the link above. Kettle’s Yard is open Tuesday-Sunday, 11.30am-5pm. Entry is free.