Magazine

The Abstract Landscapes of Franco Fontana

“The purpose of art,” says Franco Fontana, “is to make visible the invisible.” This could seem like a strange thing for a photographer to say since the essential purpose of the camera is to captur...

Painting with Scissors - Why We Love Henri Matisse Cut Outs

The final artwork by Henri Matisse can not be found in a museum. It is a window, dubbed the rose window, high on a rear wall of Union Church in Pocantico Hills, a riverside hamlet 25 miles north o...

How Photogram Introduced the Non-Representational to Photography

A photogram is a cameraless photograph: an image burned onto a photosensitive surface without the use of a machine. Photograms predate photographs. The earliest photographic images of reality capt...

The Abstraction Shining in Neon Art

Zdenek Pesanek was the first to make neon art. Pesanek was a kinetic artist known previously as the inventor of the Spectrophone, or color piano. His earliest neon works were abstract sculptures, ...

The Power of Steel in the Sculptures of the Late Alf Lechner

When he died on 27 February 2017, Alf Lechner was one of the most prolific sculptors in the world. Yet he was not widely known outside his native Germany. The reason for his relatively low profile...

Justice to Pissarro by Dana Gordon

For over a century, the painter Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) has been considered the father of modern art. His ascendancy, which began around 1894, had a tidal influence on the development of the avan...

When William Klein Turned to Abstraction in Photography

William Klein is considered one of the most influential photographers of the past century. His reputation comes largely from his work as a street photographer, a genre he all but invented in the 1...

What's in The Miller Company Collection of Abstract Art ?

The Miller Company Collection of Abstract Art may be the most important collection of abstract art you never heard of. Ten years after its inception it changed its name to the Tremaine Collection,...

The Legacy of Sir Howard Hodgkin

The renowned British abstract painter and printmaker Howard Hodgkin was among the most decorated artists of his generation. He represented Britain in the 1984 Venice Biennale and won the Turner Pr...

The Story of Abstract Textile Design

Abstract textile design is not new. If fact, few elements of human culture are older. It is hard to say exactly how long textiles have existed, since unlike pottery or stone tools woven cloth disi...

The Assembled Art of Barbara Kasten

At first glance the art of Barbara Kasten may not seem subversive. Kasten builds architectonic sculptural compositions in her studio then lights and photographs them, transforming temporary, three...

Fernand Leger, Between Abstraction and Cubism

Because of the brightly colored, flat paintings of everyday objects he painted beginning in the 1930s, Fernand Léger is considered one of the forefathers of Pop Art. But Léger first became known f...

When Georgia O'Keeffe Created Abstract Art

It is a challenge when interacting with art to ignore the clichés, allegories and judgments heaped upon it by others, and to simply come at it with an open mind. This is particularly difficult wit...

The Infinite Art of Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama is timeless. At nearly 90 years old, this visionary artist still works in her studio every day from nine in the morning until six in the evening. When she finishes each night she retu...

Virtual Reality in Art - A Powerful New Game-Changer

Virtual Reality art is nothing new. In the 1960s, Morton Heilig invented the Sensorama, considered by some to have been the first Virtual Reality artwork. Heilig described his invention, which imm...

Willem de Kooning - The Man of Many Contradictions

Willem de Kooning is easy to love and easy to hate. De Kooning is an epic figure in the story of 20th Century abstract art, partly because of his work and partly because of his personality. Born i...

Why the Grid Paintings of Stanley Whitney Matter

The recent paintings by American abstract painter Stanley Whitney have a distinct grid-like quality. They are architectonic stacks of colors, evocative of Neo-Plasticist television color bars. And...

Mary Abbott - One of the Most Important Artists of Abstract Expressionism

Many people first encountered the paintings of Mary Abbott in 2016, when she was one of a dozen painters included in the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism at the Denver Art Museum. To pre...

The Many Shades and Mediums of Jeremy Blake

Scores of articles have been written about Jeremy Blake. But strangely, precious few of them talk in depth about his art. A multimedia artist who came to prominence in the early 2000s, Blake worke...

The Abstract and the Obscure in the Art of Niki de Saint Phalle

More than a decade after her death Niki de Saint Phalle remains an icon of courage. It is an act of bravery for an artist to make honest, personal work. Inviting the rest of humanity along as you ...

How Aaron Siskind Found Abstraction on the Streets

Aaron Siskind was one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In part, that influence manifested through the various teaching positions Siskind held at some of the most prestigiou...

How Wolfgang Tillmans Used Technique to Reach Abstraction in Photography

Nothing can be fully appreciated without understanding its opposite. We appreciate warmth when we freeze. We love light when trapped in darkness. So it is no surprise that Wolfgang Tillmans, who f...

Female Abstract Artists You Should Know

There is a gender bias in art. But important female abstract artists are not in short supply. The problem is market demand. In 1971, Linda Nochlin wrote an influential article on gender bias in ar...

Abstraction within the Postmodernism of David Salle

In the introduction to her 2011 interview with the artist David Salle, writer Emily Nathan labeled Salle, “just about the last Postmodernist Painter.” Although that description is itself a bit of ...

The Trickiest Op Art Pattern Examples

Op Art is an anomaly. Victor Vasarely pioneered the movement in the 1930s as a serious aesthetic investigation. But today we are as likely to see an Op Art pattern on a painting in a museum as on ...

Why the Art Of Georg Baselitz Is Essentially Abstract ?

The art of Georg Baselitz has been called shocking, controversial and grotesque. It has also been called epic, and among the most internationally influential German art of the past 50 years. His p...

Combining the Abstract and the Figurative - Art of Albert Oehlen

At first glance many of the paintings of Albert Oehlen look complicated, like the visual equivalent of noise. They combine figurative elements with elements that are purely abstract. They incorpor...

Oscar Murillo - A Pioneer of Visceral Contemporary Abstraction

It may be impossible to say what secret forces conspire in the creation of a good abstract painting. But Colombian-born, London-based artist Oscar Murillo harnesses these forces regularly in his s...

Finding Abstraction within the Neo-Expressionism

The study of Neo-Expressionism can lead one down a rabbit hole. Innumerable elucidations of this late-20th Century art movement exist. Each seems to differ in its perspective, in often-contradicto...

Turbulent Life and Art of Martin Kippenberger

This year will mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Martin Kippenberger. A leader in a revolutionary generation of German artists to emerge in the 1970s, Kippenberger died on 7 March 1997 at ...

The Miro-esque in the Work of Christian Rosa

It is a blessing and a curse for a young artist to be compared to a master. Consider Christian Rosa. Born in 1982, he received his first major solo gallery exhibition in 2014. Now he is already be...

From Abstract to Figuration - The Path of Richard Diebenkorn

When Richard Diebenkorn died in 1993 he left behind a body of work that defended the importance of painting. Despite rubbing elbows with some of the most influential artists of his generation he r...

The Importance of Texture in Abstract Art

Broadly speaking there are two categories of texture in art, just as in life: rough and smooth. Both can be hard or soft, wet or dry, organic or synthetic, etc. And infinite gradations of roughnes...

Paul Nash and History Within the Abstract

British painter Paul Nash is not normally mentioned in conversations about abstraction. But his Modernist, sometimes-surreal images reveal glimpses of the profound abstract concepts often lurking ...

What Can be Considered Abstract in Robert Rauschenberg's Artwork

An abstraction is a starting point. It is the seed of an idea that could, under the right contemplative circumstances, circumstances that require openness in order to manifest, grow into a forest ...

Bold Color and Geometry in the Painting of Gillian Ayres

The acclaimed British abstract artist Gillian Ayres has been making art professionally for nearly 70 years. Since graduating from Camberwell School of Art in London in 1950, she has never wavered ...

Guggenheim Exhibits 170 Modern Works for its 80th Anniversary

Over the years we have had the pleasure of attending many Guggenheim exhibits. But to our embarrassment we admit that we have displayed a rather cavalier attitude toward the provenance of the work...

The Week in Abstract Art – Our Universally Subjective World

It is easy to forget how differently each of us experiences the world. It is in our nature to seek conclusions, to make definitive statements. We want something to be true for everyone. But we are...

Abstract Photographers to Follow

Abstract photography has blossomed since the invention of digital cameras, especially since cameras merged with our mobile devices. Abstract photographers work in a form that demands experimentati...

Discover the Gouache Art You Can Collect

We have written before about gouache art, exploring its rich history and traditions in relation to abstraction. Gouache is a versatile paint medium that combines some of the most desirable traits ...

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was an immeasurably influential American abstract artist known for, among other things, kick-starting Post-Painterly Abstraction. She championed individuality and experimentati...

Color, Focus and Field in Kenneth Noland Paintings

A casual observer might confuse Kenneth Noland as a painter of designs. Indeed, the most memorable Kenneth Noland paintings express a limited range of shapes and patterns: circles, chevrons, diamo...

The Secret of Making the Perfect Pastel Drawing

Pastel is a versatile word. It can be a noun when referring to a pastel, a general term for a pastel drawing or a pastel painting. It can also be a verb, as in to pastel something, meaning the act...

What is Hidden Inside an Abstract Design of a Painting

We have written before about the elements of art, such as line, color, texture, etc. Design principles are what we use to describe the ways those elements collaborate within a visual composition. ...

Owning the Greatness - Pierre Soulages

Back in 2014, French President Francois Hollande traveled to a town called Rodez, in the south of France, to preside over the opening of the Musée Soulages, a new museum dedicated to the work of F...

The Week in Abstract Art – One Thing Leads to Another

Francis Picabia was a master of transforming what exists into something new. He was one of the first proponents of abstraction in France, and as quickly as he became known for it he abandoned it, ...

Op Art Artists to Follow

When it first emerged in the Mid-20th Century, Op Art made huge impact, not just on the art world but also on the culture at large. Something about the way Op Art artists challenged our visual and...

Bridget Riley and the Philosophy of Stripes

Our sensory experiences connect us to a world of emotion. When we see something, that sense, in itself, is a sort of feeling. But then we also feel things based on what we see. Those feelings are ...