Magazine

Suprematist Composition - The Visual Manifesto of the Russian Avant-Garde

Since the mid-1800s artists have written more than 60 major manifestos. Each identifies a specific set of concerns and artistic practices. With these written manifestos artists were communicating ...

The Week in Abstract Art – Exploring the Work of Female Abstract Artists

Zoology acknowledges a multiplicity of genders. More than a dozen animal species can even autonomously alter their gender. Facebook offers users 58 gender identifications. Even sluggish politician...

Jean Feinberg Exhibition of Gouaches on Japanese Paper Opening at John Davis Gallery

Over the past decade, a small but dedicated assortment of fine art galleries has opened in Hudson, New York, 120 miles north of Manhattan. One of the first, and by consensus the best among them is...

Daniel Göttin Work in Group Exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv

Since they opened in 1986, Zürich’s Museum Haus Konstruktiv has amassed one of the world’s premier collections of Constructive and Concrete art. Opening on June 2nd, the museum will celebrate its ...

Meet Minimal Artists - The Masters of Purity and Reduction

Studying art movements is a bit like Alice going down the proverbial rabbit hole. The more you think you have figured out, the more still remains to be discovered. When first learning about Minima...

The Daring Artists of the Russian Avant-Garde

Picture two kids on a merry-go-round. One is Art, the other History. Most of the time History pushes and Art rides along, occasionally commenting, “Too fast,” or “Too slow.” But once in a while, A...

The Week in Abstract Art - Why Do We Do It?

We saw two stories recently about computer programs making abstract art. One concerned a pinball-based video game in which the ball smashes digital paint blobs then tracks paint across the screen,...

Hypnotic Nature of Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings

Sometimes nonessential elements of an artwork disrupt our ability to enjoy it. Maybe it’s the artwork’s value, the artist’s notoriety, the fact that the work’s owner won’t show it, or that we can’...

Conceptual and Abstract Watercolour Exhibition at LaKaserna features Jessica Snow, Brent Hallard and José Heerkens

This week a major exhibition of contemporary abstract watercolours opened in the town of Bad Nieuweschans in the Netherlands. Hydrography III was curated by Iemke van Dijk and Henriëtte van ’t Hoo...

Brilliant Examples of Minimal Art

Minimal art is easy to misunderstand. Partly that’s because artists, critics, art historians and art theorists often disagree about Minimalism’s objectives and defining characteristics. Some of Mi...

These are the Most Revolutionary Works by Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich named Suprematism for what it possessed: “supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts.” In the catalogue for his first Suprematist exhibition, he announced that ...

The Week in Abstract Art – (R)evolution is a Cycle

When conditions are favorable things change. Sometimes it’s through evolution, a slow, ongoing mutation. Sometimes it’s through revolution, an immediate metamorphosis instigated by an action or ev...

Abstract Artists Triumph in Spring Auction Season

Evidently celebrations are in motion (pun intended) for the 40th anniversary of the death of the kinetic abstract artist Alexander Calder, who passed away 11 November 1976. More than 30 of Calder’...

Tribute to François Morellet: The Legacy in Abstract Geometry

When an artist dies a light turns off. Not many of us have been lucky enough to personally encounter the work of François Morellet. In fact, even among abstract art lovers the name Morellet is bar...

A Short Introduction to Suprematism

Can we transcend the material world? If so, can abstract artwork help us in this quest? Today it’s commonplace to discus abstract art in terms of its role as spiritual intermediary. But in the ear...

How to Define Monochrome Painting

In 1921, the Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko exhibited three monochrome paintings – titled Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color – which he deemed the ultimate pictorial...

The Week in Abstract Art – Questions of Time and Place

Our world is shaped by processes. Time passes, circumstances change slowly, sometimes cataclysmically, and our environment evolves. How lovely it is when we can take a moment to be around art capa...

What is Drawing?

From pencil to ink, charcoal to pastel, drawings represent an important part of our offering at IdeelArt. But, what is drawing actually? Though most often associated with figurative artistic movem...

Dansaekhwa Korean Painting - A New Trend in Abstract Art

Many different paths lead to the same destination. Throughout humanity’s history of making art, various impetuses have caused painters to engage in what we might call the urge to simplify, or to p...

The Theory of Neoplasticism - Reducing the Art to Pure Components

The artist Theo van Doesburg once wrote, “The white canvas is almost solemn. Each superfluous line, each wrongly placed line, any color placed without veneration or care, can spoil everything.” In...

Love in the Age of Medium Specificity

As art lovers, we seek ways of increasing our enjoyment of art. One reliable way we’ve found to do this is to converse with each other about the art we love, to talk about what we like, what we do...

Neo-Dada and Abstraction in the Game of Meaning

As its name might suggest, Neo-Dada should not be confused with Dada. Although some artists associated with both movements used similar techniques, and the meaning of the works associated with bot...

These Dadaist Artists Delved into Abstraction

Who were the Dadaists? They were a community of writers, performers, visual artists, intellectuals and creatives of all kinds. Unlike many art movements that came before it, Dadaism wasn’t defined...

Three of the Most Effective Ways to Light Your Art

"Let there be light" - if only it was that easy for abstract art lovers to display their collections optimally. Too much light and the intensity could overpower the artwork; too little and its bea...

The Week in Abstract Art – New Looks for Spring 2016

Last week we mentioned the Tate Modern’s forthcoming re-boot following its £260 Million expansion. This week we glance westward at three iconic American art All-Stars (the San Francisco and New Yo...

The Abstraction of Cubist Collage

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque permanently altered the course of abstract art when they introduced the techniques of collage and papier collé (pasted paper) to their Cubist compositions. Some of...

Golden Ratio in the Art of Abstraction

One definition we’ve heard of a good abstract painting is “any abstract painting someone enjoys being around.” But what exactly makes someone enjoy being around one abstract painting over another?...

Square Tendencies: Abstraction and Geometry

The use of geometric patterns in art is an ancient human tendency. Long before the European and American abstract artists explored geometric statements in their work, Islamic artists, bound by str...

Synthetic Cubism Explained - Planes, Shapes and Vantage Points

Pablo Picasso, the father of Cubism, was famous for his eagerness to evolve. After inventing Analytic Cubism in 1907, he easily could have just kept painting in that style for decades and still go...

The Anti-Art of Dadaism and its Paintings

The term Dadaism describes a time in art history when artists confronted the absurdity of human culture. The author Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Take life seriously but none of the people in it.” Tho...

The Will to Restraint: Tendencies of Reductive Art

When thinking about art, it’s rare to arrive at terminology that transcends the limiting concepts of style, period, or movement. But when we do it can be liberating, even unifying, to discover lan...

The Week in Abstract Art – Our Huge Little World

As our world shrinks, our story is becoming so much larger. The next generation to arrive on this planet will have a much better idea of the vast range of their options than we did when we got her...

Elements of Abstraction - Elizabeth Gourlay in an Interview

Elizabeth Gourlay considers her work a meditation on shapes and colors, sometimes comparing her studio practice to the process of composing music. Using a mixture of mediums ranging from oils to g...

The Beauty Found in Cubist Portraits

In 1878 Margaret Wolfe Hamilton, in her novel Molly Bawn, coined one of humanity’s most beloved sentiments: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Three years later Picasso was born. Though Hamil...

The Psychology Behind Shape and Form

Why does abstract art appeal? Often considered to be a visual language of shape, color and form, there is something very particular in the attraction to an abstract work of art. Several theories e...

How Analytical Cubism Prefigured Pure Abstraction

What seem like opposite forces in the world actually compliment each other. So it was in the turn of the 20th Century between two major, simultaneous trends in the world of art: analytical cubism ...

The Week in Abstract Art – Pollock-Palooza

For fans of 20th Century abstraction this is a good year. Two major exhibitions open this month: In New York, Robert Motherwell: The Art of Collage is on view now through 21 May at Paul Kasmin Gal...

Hiscox Online Art Trade Report 2016: A (slightly self-celebrating) review by IdeelArt

Since 2013, the insurance company Hiscox (an underwriter at Lloyd's of London) has produced an annual report analyzing trends in the online art trade. The unbiased report is compiled with help fro...

Photographing Paintings: How to Take a Good Photograph of Your Art ?

Whether you want to create prints of your work, share it online or simply keep a personal record before selling it, knowing how to take the perfect picture is vital. With photographs often being t...

Picasso Portraits Coming to the National Portrait Gallery This Autumn

Pablo Picasso created more than 150,000 individual works of art in his lifetime. Nearly 20,000 of those works were paintings, and a shocking number of those were portraits. This autumn, the Nation...

How Paul Strand Wielded Photography into a Channel for Abstraction

It’s strange to think that some people consider photography to be a purely technical craft, and not art. An artist invented the medium after all. In the hands of photography’s most famous practiti...

Art Packaging

In an ever-increasing cosmopolitan and international art world, in which online platforms like IdeelArt are facilitating sales to and from all corners of the globe, artwork can travel thousands of...

Discover the Mysteries of Orphism in Painting

In the field of abstract art, mysticism and science sometimes become unwitting bedfellows. One example is Orphism, a brief and sometimes misunderstood art movement from the early years of the 20th...

Christine Macel Selected to Direct 57th Venice Biennale

Back on April 9th of 1893, the Venice City Council voted in favor of a resolution to hold an art show. At first it was only going to include Italian artists, but after some debate the council deci...

The Week in Abstract Art – Can You Read My Mind?

Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum recently announced it’s loaning nine works to London’s Royal Academy of Art to be exhibited next fall. Still was specific in his will about how his work could be sho...

Blue and Abstract Art

For centuries, the color blue has been a source of fascination for artists and art lovers alike. Difficult and expensive to procure, blue was seldom seen outside the clothing of royals, religious ...

Debra Ramsay and Sarah Hinckley Take Part in Two Separate Perceptive Exhibitions

Conceptual curation is a way of bringing together artists who may not normally show together in order to explore concepts, ideas or realms that are universal in their work. Today we highlight Idee...

What Makes Someone Choose a Piece of Art ?

Art is uniquely personal, not only to the artist who creates it, but also to the person viewing it. Nowhere is this truer than with abstract art. Art is an extension - a reflection of - the vie...