Towards a Fourth Dimension

This display explores alliances between art and science. It presents the ways in which artists in the modern age have often made it a quest to seek out where art and science coalesce to reveal an imagined fourth dimension in the spaces where they meet.

Towards a Fourth Dimension is instigated by the first showing of a recently acquired moving image work by Dutch artist Melvin Moti [b.1977]. The Eightfold Dot (2013), Moti’s silent film is a response to the scientific investigations that concerned the analysis of crystal structure made by William Henry Bragg and his son William Lawrence at the University of Leeds, for which they received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915. It acts as a starting point for a journey through a varied range of works from the Gallery’s collection, some familiar yet viewed here through a different ‘lens’, while others are less well-known.

From the mid-1920s a renaissance of interest in popular science was stimulated in part by the broadcasting activity of the BBC, then in its infancy. Talks on the wireless presenting innovative ideas, many of them about the ‘new science’, were often published in the associated magazine The Listener, established in 1929, where they found a receptive and growing audience, not only among a public eager for new ideas but especially among artists.

Artists had long been interested in uncovering and representing new ways of understanding the world, reaching beyond convention to find more metaphysical meanings. Among the many new groupings of artists interested in developing an abstracted language for art in the 1930s, scientific developments offered parallel forms, often revealed through photography and microscopy, accompanied by simplified explanations. Science occupied a new ground for the imagination that appeared more concrete yet able to generate a transcendent spiritual fantasy. Towards a Fourth Dimension shows the persistence of these interests taken forward through the different decades of the 20th century, to the present day, and how they might fire the imagination still.

Image: Melvin Moti, The Eightfold Dot, 2013, © the artist. Jointly owned by Leeds University Art Collection and Leeds Museums and Galleries. Purchased jointly with the support of The Art Fund, Leeds Art Fund, Leeds Philosophical and Literature Society and the Friends of University Art and Music (Leeds), 2021.

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