LONDON.- To mark the beginning of London Art Week, Bonhams presents Surfaces, an exhibition celebrating avant-garde artists from around the globe. The show focuses on artists who set out to liberate art from the two-dimensional format in the post-war era. Surfaces at Bonhams will run from Friday 21 June to Thursday 27 June at its flagship New Bond Street saleroom.

The exhibition will include minimalist, gestural, textured or experimental works by artists such as Pierre Soulages, Lee Ufan, Shozo Shimamoto, Carol Rama, Georges Mathieu, Antoni Tapies and Sadamasa Motonaga among others, mapping a global shift that marked art history between the 1950s and 1970s.

Works in the exhibition include:

Peinture 16 décembre 1959, by French artist Pierre Soulages. Known as the ‘painter of black’, the work depicts Soulages signature black pigment raked across an intensely red backdrop. The vivid blood-red colour, which is rare in works by Soulages, shines beneath his thick black oil strokes. The large canvas measures 129 by 130cm.

From Cuts by Korean artist-philosopher Lee Ufan, 1965, was exhibited in the Guggenheim exhibition Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity. The exhibition charted his creations of the visual, conceptual and theoretical terrain that expanded painting and sculpture since the 1960s. From Cuts shows the buildup of thick white oil paint on canvas to conjure the materiality and gestural abstraction of Art Informel.

Untitled by Otto Piene, 1960. Piene helped form Zero with Heinz Mack in Dusseldorf, 1957. Zero was a group of artists who practised a form of kinetic art using light and motion to open-up new forms of perception. Piene is best known for his paintings with smoke and fire called Rauchbilder (smoke pictures). The 1960s-work used oil and fire on canvas.

Luischaux by French abstract painter and theorist George Mathieu, 1970. Credited for launching the Lyrical Abstraction movement, Mathieu created many manifestos that stressed the importance of speed, the rejection of references and a joyful state of mind when painting. Luischaux shows Mathieu’s signature calligraphy against a white and red background.