Blobs and Circles
- Artist: György Kepes
- Date: c.1939–40
- Medium: Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
- Dimensions: image: 506 x 405 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the "Blobs and Circles" by György Kepes. Created around 1939‑40, it’s a gelatin‑silver photogram that captures abstract shapes – blobs, circles, prisms – made by placing objects directly onto light‑sensitive paper. Kepes, a Hungarian‑born photographer, painter and designer, first experimented with photograms in Budapest, recording nature without a camera. In the late 1920s he worked with László Moholy‑Nagy at the Berlin studio, where the Bauhaus spirit of experimentation sparked his interest in light and form. After moving to the United States in 1937, Kepes ran the Color and Light Department at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, producing many of these prints that blend scientific curiosity with artistic abstraction. The image feels like a snapshot of light itself, inviting viewers to see ordinary objects through a new, almost transparent lens.
See it in person
Blobs and Circles is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
