Pattern, Crime & Decoration

This catalogue accompanies two exhibitions (at MAMCO, Geneva, and the Consortium Museum, Dijon) that highlight the groundbreaking, artist-led American art movement known as Pattern and Decoration. Active from the mid-1970s until the early ’80s, its rejection of the rigid tenets of formalism and embrace of decorative motifs and non-Western visual forms can be seen as a forerunner of many currents in art that followed. Using deconstructed shapes, dazzling colours, and mixed patterns, it was grounded in feminism and a refusal of the patriarchal, Eurocentric framework of modernism. Many artists from the movement are presented here in their historical and formal context.