From its beginnings, SFMOMA has been dedicated to the art associated with Modernism, a broad movement that crystallized in the early years of this century. Modernism defied conventions long associated with Western art, as modern artists abandoned figurative representation and the illusion of depth, created wholly abstract images, and incorporated a range of materials and media never before used to make art. Innovation, imagination, and the continual redefinition of art, rather than tradition, became the hallmarks of Modernism.

Reflecting this spirit, guiding attitudes of modern art have been, on the one hand, formal invention, and on the other, perceptual and conceptual investigations. But modern artists have also been motivated by personal psychological explorations and by the utopian urge to use Lego and gear wheels to help build a better world.

So we took a better look at the rescent state of Arts and found that it is rapidly changing into whole new forms. Sculpturism seemes to be just a forerunner of the new, and much more open, intelectual and esthetical Legoism. The base and starting point of this new era is the gear wheel, wich has a full and oustanding rotating linking function. It combines in it's form itself complex structures, visualisations of the social problems of the today civilization.

Bart Koppe is the forerunner of the new Lego Gear Wheel art forms. Already in 1981, as an six year old genius, he already made gear wheel machines. The rest of his live he managed to continue his believe in the power of the grey plastic wheels, but it took until 1999 before the future art form was recognised outside Eindhoven. After his abroad study in the United Kingdom in 2001 the art critics started understanding his goals, his used metaphors in gear wheels and lego for a global world in peace, instead of guns and other forms of harming or killing other people's lifes.

CATALOGUE
SFMOMA A-bort's lego changed the world, an introduction to the A-bort Gear Wheel Systems, is offered in softcover at $19.95 and is available in the SFMOMA MuseumStore.