#abstract

They say this was one of a set of three — a mural for people arriving by air, a pavement mosaic in the middle of town for those on foot, and a poster — all meant to welcome you to Barcelona. Apparently a ceramicist friend did the actual tilework.

The picture isn't painted on — it's laid into the brickwork itself, different bricks for the different bits, so it's as permanent as the wall. And the wall belongs to a neighbourhood library, which apparently got its own decoration rather than a poster.

According to what I found, the blank ends of these prefab blocks got handed to artists as giant canvases — there was a whole programme of it in the East. Beyond that I couldn't dig up anything about this one in particular.

This is from just before he gave up recognisable subjects altogether — a year or two on, he was painting pictures of nothing in particular and arguing they could work on you the way music does.

He obviously tilted these on purpose — turning the square to a diamond was meant to clash with the flat walls and floors of whatever room it ended up in.

The title apparently means the crater a volcano leaves behind. Why there's one sat in the middle of a square I couldn't work out — if anyone knows the story, I'd love it.

According to the museum, the painter was hurt in a gas attack at Verdun during WWI — this one's supposed to be a tribute to pilots and flying machines in general, not a portrait of any one of them.

Not much comes up searching for this one — it's just been fixed to that wall a long while. Judging by some other pictures it's huge.

Apparently the title's a bit of wordplay - Senecio's a plant name that also echoes the Latin word for 'old man,' which is what the face is meant to be.

This is Suprematism — the idea, from what I can find, was to throw out recognizable objects and see if shape and color alone could carry a painting.

I couldn't find much backstory on this one — the title apparently translates to 'Spiral of Time,' which tracks given the twist running up the steel.

You'll come across this sat out on the grass on the Promenade de l'Observatoire, close enough to lean on. From what I've read he wanted them outdoors on purpose — weather, sky, people climbing about — and pushed for that whenever he had a say in where one ended up.

From what I could find, the coloured strip is light-reflecting foil — even the photo's own caption calls it that — so it's supposed to change as the daylight does. It went up on an ordinary block of flats in Kaulsdorf: no plaque, no gallery, just there.

I couldn't track down a name for this one, but the year puts it right in the stretch where he was working with an engineering firm to mass-produce cast aluminium forms — some from that batch were built as literal playground equipment for a shop. He's tagged as the godfather of Pop Art, but this run of work reads more like an industrial catalogue than a collage of magazine cuttings.

According to Wikipedia, this hung in his own dining room for years before his wife gave it to a museum after his death.

This caused a proper public row when it went up. It got nicknamed "the Yellow Peril", the council had it taken apart and shifted out of the way, and by most accounts it sat out of the centre of town for years before landing where it is now.

Oldenburg spent decades blowing up small household objects into oversized public sculptures, and from what I can find, a lot of the later ones were worked out with his wife and collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen. This is one of their bathroom-themed sculptures — from a run of work that helped push Pop art off the canvas and into actual parks and plazas.

Brâncuși spent something like twenty years chasing this exact shape — no feathers, no wings, not even a head, because from what I've read he wasn't after what a bird looks like, just the feeling of one lifting off. He's said to have carved or cast this same idea more than a dozen times, in marble and in bronze. One of the bronze versions ended up in a legal fight when US customs refused to wave it through as art and taxed it as scrap metal instead — the case that followed is apparently still taught as the moment the law had to decide what actually counts as sculpture.