The Best Shaped Canvases for Thinking Outside the Box

Ask anyone to conjure up an image of a painter’s canvas and chances are they’ll picture a rectangular one. The rectangle’s dominance is as much a technical matter as an aesthetic one—canvas is easiest to stretch on a squared-off frame. But something as simple as changing the shape of a canvas can have an enormous impact on the work. Many attribute the advent of the shaped canvas to the turn-of-the-century Constructivist movement and artists like Peter Laszlo Peri, who cha