Saturday Family Workshop

Decoding Modernism is a Saturday Family Workshop series that introduces families to key ideas and shifts in modern art, helping them understand how artists moved away from realistic representation towards new ways of seeing, feeling, and expressing the world. Each session explores a different modernist approach through hands-on making and discussion.

The first workshop in the series looks at spirituality and one’s inner experience in abstraction, drawing from artists like Wassily Kandinsky, who believed that colours, shapes and movement could express emotions and states of mind beyond the visible world. Participants are invited to explore how art can communicate feeling without depicting recognisable objects or scenes.

Families will work with abstract forms, colours, and motion-based imagery to create a short stop-motion animation. Through sequencing shapes and marks, participants experiment with rhythm, repetition, and movement, discovering how abstract elements can suggest mood, energy, and emotion over time.

This way of working connects to Tyeb Mehta’s modernist journey, where he moved away from literal storytelling and instead used gesture, colour, and form to convey psychological intensity and inner tension. The workshop encourages families to think about abstraction not as something difficult or distant, but as a powerful visual language rooted in experience and feeling.

Audience Takeaways:

* Understand abstraction as a way of expressing inner experience rather than depicting reality

* Learn how movement, colour, and form can communicate emotion

* Explore basic principles of modernism through hands-on animation

* Connect ideas of spirituality and abstraction to Tyeb Mehta’s modernist practice

* Take home a short stop-motion animation created together as a family

While you’re here, we invite you to also explore KNMA’s ongoing exhibition TYEB MEHTA Bearing Weight (with the lightness of being)