Sunday Art Dialogue: The Cubist Spirit in Art Today

Going through my art library I came across this vintage catalogue which prompted me reflect on the idea of perception... Perception is more than sight; it is the process through which we make meaning from what we experience. In art, perception involves not only the eyes but also the mind, memory, imagination, and emotion.

The Cubist spirit remains one of the most influential forces in contemporary art. Although the revolutionary movement pioneered by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris in the early twentieth century has long since evolved, its fundamental ideas continue to shape the way artists think about representation, space, and perception.

Cubist artists sought to capture the complexity of seeing by presenting multiple perspectives simultaneously. Time, memory, movement, and experience became as important as appearance.

Today, many contemporary artists embrace this spirit without necessarily identifying as Cubists. The influence can be seen in abstraction, installation, photography, digital art, sculpture, and even architecture.

For example, David Hockney's The Joiners series are among the most important photographic works of the late twentieth century. Created mainly in the early 1980s, they challenged the assumption that photography simply records a single moment from a single point of view. Instead, Hockney transformed photography into something closer to Cubism, combining dozens—or sometimes hundreds—of individual photographs into a single image.

Hockney argued that the conventional camera gives us an unnatural view of the world. A camera lens records one instant from one fixed position. Human vision doesn't work like that. He said, 'the hand moving through time reflects the mind moving through time (and life moving through time).

The Joiners ask a profound question:

WHAT DOES IT REALLY MEAN TO SEE?