The modern avant-gardes from the first few decades of the 20th century inaugurated new formal languages and new poetics in the channel of abstraction that enabled unprecedented real and imaginary configurations. Other images from the geometric, the concrete and the analytical would arrive to denote various symbolic, metaphysical, transcendental or mystical representations and challenge figurative, informal or expressionist conventions.

Elena Asins (1940-2015), Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003) and Pablo Palazuelo (1916-2007) are three pioneers who challenged the principle of abstraction from diverse and sometimes converging formal choices. Their research processes and formal poetics reveal an interest in notions of structure, geometry, space, series, the fourth dimension and transcendence.

This case study explores the journey of these artists through the channel of geometric abstraction and its symbolic, concrete, mathematical or mystical predicates. What unites them is an attention to creative intuition in dialogue with analytical assumptions, to the golden section and to spatial issues in dialogue with architecture and urbanism.

Asins, Oteiza, Palazuelo. Shaping the Transcendental is a case study for Bilduma Hau Colección. Elementary Movements (1950-2000), the exhibition of the museum's holdings.

Curated by Fernando Golvano.

[Image: Monroy I. Pablo Palazuelo, 1974. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country]

Brochure List of works