Saturday Family Workshop

Decoding Modernism is a Saturday Family Workshop series that introduces families to key shifts in modern art, focusing on how artists questioned traditional painting and expanded the idea of what an artwork could be. Each workshop explores a different modernist approach through hands-on making and discussion.

This third workshop looks at spatialism and the idea of the extended canvas, inspired by artists such as Lucio Fontana, who moved beyond painting as a flat surface by cutting, puncturing, and opening it up to space. Participants are encouraged to think about the artwork not just as an image, but as an object that interacts with space, light, and movement.

Participants will work with paper and mixed materials to explore ideas of cutting, layering, and extending the surface beyond its boundaries. By intervening directly into the material, participants experience how absence, openings, and negative space can become as expressive as marks and colour.

This approach connects with Tyeb Mehta’s radical rethinking of pictorial space, particularly his use of the diagonal line to fracture and reorganise the canvas. Like Mehta, participants will explore how breaking the surface can introduce tension, movement, and new ways of seeing.

Audience Takeaways:

- Understand how modern artists challenged the flatness of the canvas

- Explore space, material, and structure as key elements of art making

- Learn how cutting, layering, and openings can shape meaning

- Connect spatial experimentation to Tyeb Mehta’s reorganisation of pictorial space

- Take home a mixed media artwork that extends beyond traditional surface boundaries