The exhibition starts with a group of photographs that the artist made between the 1920s and 30s and which he titled ‘Structure studies’. From these images can be deduced the artist’s aim to search for structural elements within nature, elements that he could subsequently use in his abstract compositions. This aspect can be clearly seen in his bas-reliefs from the 1940s.
Domela started creating bas-reliefs from the second half of the 1920s onwards, after he felt disillusioned with the rigidity of ‘Neoplasticist’ compositions. These works are characterised for the use of an extremely varied array of materials, i.e. metal, plastic, wood, shark’s skin, crocodile’s skin… The combination and use of such distant and varied materials is the consequence of wanting to provide a very suggestive expressive force to his works and at the same time put some distance between his work and that produced by artists connected with the rigid geometric abstraction of the time.