According to the commentary at a Rutgers University exhibition site, "... the first significant art historical attention paid to shaped canvases occurred in the 1960s...."[2] Peter Laszlo Peri created polychromatic “cut-out” paintings as part of the Constructivist movement between 1921 and 1924.
Argentine artist Lucio Fontana also began early on the experiment in shaped and compartmentalized canvases with his Concetto Spaziale, Attese series in 1959.
[10] Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Charles Hinman, Ronald Davis, Edward Clark, Richard Tuttle, Leo Valledor, Neil Williams, John Levee, David Novros, Robert Mangold, Dean Fleming, Gary Stephan, Paul Mogenson, Clark Murray, and Al Loving are examples of artists associated with the use of the shaped canvas during the period beginning in the early 1960s.
Geometric abstract artists, minimalists, and hard-edge painters may, for example, elect to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format.
In fact, the use of the shaped canvas is primarily associated with paintings of the 1960s and 1970s that are coolly abstract, formalistic, geometrical, objective, rationalistic, clean-lined, brashly sharp-edged, or minimalist in character.
A student of Hans Hofmann, and sharing his concern for pictorial depth as well as his reverence for nature, she also favors colors, textures, and shapes that are complex, nuanced, and organic or earthen – giving her work a brooding or introspective quality that further sets it apart from that of many other shaped-canvas painters.
In the late 1960s, Trevor Bell, a leading member of the British St. Ives group introduced dynamic shaped-canvas paintings that combined radical, angular structures with an abstract expressionist sensibility.
The artist’s highly chromatic, color field surfaces on massive canvases merged shaped painting and the subsequent blank space surrounding the object into a state of equal importance.
The Filipino artist Pacita Abad (1946–2004) stuffed and stitched her painted canvases for a three-dimensional effect, combining this technique (which she called trapunto, after a kind of quilting technique) with free-wheeling mixed media effects, riotous color, and abstract patterning suggestive of festive homemade textiles, or of party trappings such as streamers, balloons, or confetti.
[17] The study of the paintings of the aforementioned Rhod Rothfuss led him to work in the realization of Madí Turning Paintings-Relief (irregular frame) and 3D digital animations of those geometric structures.
Gyula Kosice (sculptor, poet, theorist, and one of the founders of the Argentine avant-garde of the 1940s) wrote: "He has rationally computerized the primordial ideas of Madi Art...
"[18] Artists have often departed from the norm, especially in circumstances requiring special commissions, an example being the paintings Henri Matisse created for Albert C. Barnes[19] and for Nelson Rockefeller.