Installation Art

Installation Art: lesson ideasDo your students understand modern art? Below I have collected ideas that you can choose, adapt to your students’ level and needs.

Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called public art, land art or art intervention; however, the boundaries between these terms overlap.

Installation as nomenclature for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently; its first use as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1969. It was coined in this context, in reference to a form of art that had arguably existed since prehistory but was not regarded as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century.

Forest of Numbers by Emmanuelle Moureaux

Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson 1938-1973

The Urchins by Choi+Shine Architects

Plexus 35 by Gabriel Dawes

The beauty in a piece of art may be subjective, but these installations can safely be labelled pretty loo-py. Turkish artist Sakir Gökçebağ used hundreds of toilet rolls in creating his paper installations displayed at a gallery in Germany. The toilet rolls are sprawled across walls or hung elaborately from plinths to ‘bring beauty to the everyday’ in big, flowing pieces of art.

His Zen Garden is a large three-dimensional drawing in black and white. Lines run the length of the main gallery’s floor – interrupted by sporadic ‘rock’ clusters – and evenly spaced rectangles cover the walls. Songailo’s repetitive patterns have a seductive quality to them and the overall effect is not at all frenetic.

Zen Garden is not typical of Songailo’s brightly coloured public installations, however its duo-tone simplicity stands in nice contrast to the artist’s urban body of work. It also makes the hint of pink glimpsed through the doorway of Fontanelle’s second gallery an even more intriguing gesture.

Dan Steinhilber Dan Steinhilber chael, is one of Washington’s leading abstractionists — his art has often explored that art form’s legacy. Here, he’s used knotted balloons to simulate a classic “action painting” of the 1950s. As the balloons deflate, some of its “action” will fade away, too.