“The Aesthetics of Useful Forms”, Sigma Group Exhibition in Timișoara

THE AESTHETICS OF USEFUL FORMS

Curator: Andreea Palade Flondor

 

At the beginning of the 1970s, the term design had not yet become widely established. The Sigma Group explored both the methods of generating form within the context of a visual grammar and the relationship between form and utility. Their concerns as artists were directed toward interdisciplinarity, and thus visual research was connected with new disciplines such as bionics, psychology, mathematics, and cybernetics.

“The aesthetics of useful forms,” as this direction was called, integrated function and utility with visual exploration, constructivist approaches, and form-generating principles. The group’s first projects — such as The White Pyramid, Equipartitions of Space, and The Information Tower — proposed new ways of perceiving or structuring the urban environment.

 

The Sigma Group was formed in 1969 when, following the emigration of Roman Cotoșman abroad, the group 1+1+1 was forced to dissolve. Ștefan Bertalan and Constantin Flondor then invited their younger colleagues from the Art High School in Timișoara — Ion Gaita, Elisei Rusu, and Doru Tulcan — as well as mathematician Lucian Codreanu, forming Sigma 1 as a sum of individualities. The group also promoted collaboration, the use of photography and film as means of knowledge and expression, the diversification of methods of configuration and media of manifestation, regarding nature and the environment as a framework for visual research and a space for artistic action, as well as the development of a pedagogical program.

The group’s pedagogical program — the Experimental Curriculum carried out beginning in 1970 at the Art High School in Timișoara with the approval of the Ministry of Education — became a landmark in Romanian education, and the reverberations of this pedagogy can still be seen today in the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timișoara.

The exhibition brings to light several design projects created by Constantin Flondor and Doru Tulcan, presenting the correlation between the group’s research, their individual investigations, and the issues explored with students in the classroom.