Stefan Sagmeister’s “Beautiful Numbers”

The show’s highlights were the 14 mixed-media works that embed geometric forms into 19th-century paintings—some of which were unsold from Sagmeisters’ great-grandparents’ antique shop and were stored in the attic of his family home in Bregenz, Austria, where he eventually found them. Though there are no indications on the pieces themselves about what the graphics mean, the compositions stand independently as striking images, with the information decoded on a corresponding checklist. Woman I, (1900/2000) (all works 2021) is a portrait of an aristocratic woman with three inlaid circles. A yellow dot at the top represents global female voting rights in 1900; a medium size pink disc in the center of her forehead symbolizes the number of women voting in 1950; and a much larger purple sphere covering the lower half of her face and upper chest denotes how more women had the right to vote in 2000 than ever before. Famine I, (1860/2000) employs a stunning, Dutch-style still-life of blooming flowers to show an universal reduction in victims of starvation; the number of related deaths in 1860 is indicated with a thick yellow outline of a square, whereas the declining number in 2000 is represented by a smaller area of red. Carbon I, (1800/2020), a seascape with three bright shapes, was an anomaly in the show, in that it compares the volume of carbon dioxide emitted between 1800 and 2020 from three geographical areas, instead of charting changes over time. The amount released from China, rendered in yellow, is relatively small; the USA’s contribution, in blue, is much larger; and the volume from Europe, illuminated in red, is massive.