At the beginning of the 20th century, painting underwent a profound transformation. Artists no longer wanted to depict the visible; they aspired to a new visual language that reduced artistic expression to an interplay of colors, lines, and shapes. Geometric Abstraction viewed these elements as a visual language that reflected the modern world and transcended national boundaries. Kandinsky’s Universe: Geometric Abstraction in the 20th Century spans six decades and showcases how Geometric Abstraction found radical expression in all its variations in Europe and the USA.

Inspired by the advanced technologies and theories of their time, including concepts of the fourth dimension and the space-time continuum, artists expanded their understanding of space and time. With images of geometric shapes floating in indefinite space, they sought to represent cosmic themes and higher spiritual levels. A central figure of this art movement was Wassily Kandinsky, who laid the theoretical foundations with his work Point and Line to Plane.

The exhibition features 125 works by over seventy artists, including Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Barbara Hepworth, Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, and Victor Vasarely. The more than thirty international lenders include the Courtauld Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Fondation Beyeler near Basel, the Fondation Gandur pour l‘Art in Genève, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.