CIRCLE: A SYMBOL OF OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE REALMS

Abstract

Discussing the history of non-representational art in the 1800s, the paper traces the meaning behind metaphorical use of the circle as a shape on the painting named “Circles in a Circle” particularly and its other complementary elements which help to complete the painting in a significant connotation. Those geometrical shapes having universal meanings, were used as symbols to relate with a probability of an inspiration of Russian folk art, cosmology, revealing spiritual connections of the high and the low realms. The paper explores the profound meaning and foundation of abstraction in the contexts mentioned above using the descriptive methodology as qualitative research type. The paper investigates Wassily Kandinsky’s painting as a symbolic, spiritual, and abstract expression that provides the path for a new genre of modernism. The paintings and information became an inspiration for understanding and following the mechanism of Kandinsky’s thought, improvisation and shift of style. This art practice followed the mechanism of improvisation in sketches to modify these from representational to non-representational creation. The paper concludes that the artist used circle as a symbol of the conscious self-transformation from material to non-material. It exposes the artist’s consciousness about the concealed abstraction behind real objects or naturalism and their meanings decoding mutual relation of two realms of the universe.