Abstraction
On origins, departure, and the world left behind.
The oldest debate in abstraction: does it begin from something, or from nothing? Kandinsky derived his first abstractions from landscape; Mondrian from the tree. Even the most apparently pure form carries the residue of a departure. This framework considers abstraction not as a rejection of the world but as a process of extraction, what is retained when the recognizable is progressively removed, and at what point does the origin become irrelevant?
On the picture plane, illusionism, and Greenberg's legacy.
No concept has been more generative — or more contested — in the criticism of abstract art than flatness. Greenberg argued that modernist painting's historical task was the acknowledgment of its own surface: the elimination of illusionistic depth in favor of the literal plane. This exhibition revisits flatness as both a formal condition and an ideological one, asking what has been gained and foreclosed by making the picture plane the limit of meaning.
On mark-making, expression, and the trace of the body in paint.
Abstract Expressionism placed the artist's gesture at the center of meaning: the brushstroke as index of consciousness, the drip as record of movement. But gesture has never been self-evident, it is also performance, convention, and theater. This exhibition considers the gestural mark across its full range, from the ecstatic to the analytical, asking what the body's trace in paint can and cannot claim to reveal.
On chromatic experience, optical force, and meaning without form.
For Rothko, Newman, and Albers, color was not decoration but the primary vehicle of experience — capable of producing states that drawing and form could not. This framework focuses on color field abstraction and its descendants, examining how color alone can structure space, generate emotion, and resist interpretation. We invite works that treat color as subject rather than attribute, where the painting is the color, not a painting that uses color.
On scale, overwhelm, and what exceeds representation.
The sublime enters abstraction through the desire to paint what cannot be depicted: the infinite, the formless, the transcendent. Newman's "zips," Turrell's light, Rothko's late black paintings, all reach toward an experience that exceeds the object. This exhibition explores how abstraction inherits the romantic project of the sublime and transforms it: not nature as overwhelming force, but the work itself as threshold of the unrepresentable.
On chance, indeterminacy, and form that arrives uninvited.
When Pollock dripped and Frankenthaler poured, intention was redistributed rather than abandoned. Process-based abstraction places the artist in negotiation with gravity, viscosity, and chance, outcomes that could not be fully predicted are accepted as the work's logic. This framework invites proposals that foreground method over composition, where the procedure generates form and accident is not failure but discovery. What does it mean to make decisions about conditions rather than results?
On order, repetition, and abstraction's most contested structure.
Rosalind Krauss called the grid the emblem of modernist ambition and its self-defeat simultaneously, a structure that announces autonomy while endlessly repeating itself. The grid is both the most rational and the most spiritual of abstract forms: Mondrian's theosophical geometry, Agnes Martin's meditative lines, Sol LeWitt's logical systems. This exhibition treats the grid not as a solution but as a site of unresolved tension between freedom and constraint, transcendence and mechanism.
On the edge of emptiness and the question of how far to go.
Malevich's black square posed a question that abstraction has never fully answered: is there a limit to reduction, and what lies beyond it? Minimalism pushed the object toward blankness; monochrome painting arrived at a surface that is simultaneously everything and nothing. This framework examines reductive abstraction as a philosophical practice, the progressive elimination of incident, variation, and hierarchy, and the paradox that the emptier the work, the more insistent its presence.
On abstraction as a vehicle for the invisible.
Kandinsky's foundational text argued that abstraction arose from inner necessity, the spiritual urgency to express what material reality could not contain. This mystical impulse runs through the history of abstraction from Malevich's suprematism to the theosophical roots of de Stijl. This exhibition examines the relationship between abstraction and belief: not religion specifically, but the desire to access states, forces, or dimensions beyond the visible. When does formal autonomy become a spiritual claim?
On somatic experience, scale, and painting felt before it is read.
Abstract art that operates at human scale or beyond produces an encounter before it produces meaning, the body responds before the mind interprets. This framework considers abstraction as a somatic proposition: works sized and structured to be felt rather than decoded, where physical experience, peripheral vision, spatial immersion, the sense of being surrounded, is the primary content. Against purely optical abstraction, this is work that insists on the body in the room.
On painting after its death, and abstraction after its exhaustion.
Abstraction has been declared finished at least three times and has returned each time transformed. The "death of painting" debates of the 1980s, the zombie formalism accusations of the 2010s, and the current critical uncertainty about abstraction's relationship to the market all raise the same question: can a practice survive its own institutionalization? This exhibition looks at how abstraction is made new after its canonization, through irony, criticality, material subversion, or stubborn sincerity.
On titles, texts, and the words that surround the wordless.
Abstract art is famously resistant to verbal description, yet it is perpetually surrounded by language: titles that direct or deny, wall texts that interpret, critics who supply the meaning the work withholds. This framework examines the relationship between abstraction and discourse, how naming transforms what is seen, how silence is a position, and how the refusal of legibility is itself a kind of statement. We invite works and curatorial approaches that make the tension between the visual and the verbal explicit.
On elimination, concentration, and the removal of the unnecessary.
Reduction strips form to its essential components, removing representation, narrative, and excess. What remains is not absence, but concentration—an intensified presence of what cannot be further simplified. This operation is central to modern abstraction, articulated in the geometric purism of Kazimir Malevich.
On surface, non-illusion, and the denial of depth.
Flatness asserts the surface as the primary reality of the work. It rejects illusionistic space, emphasizing the material and visual plane. Painting no longer opens into depth, but returns to its condition as surface, a principle theorized by Clement Greenberg as fundamental to modernist painting.
On self-referentiality, independence, and internal logic.
The abstract work does not refer outward but operates according to its own internal conditions. Meaning is not derived from representation, but from the relationships within the work itself. This autonomy is central to modern aesthetics and strongly defended in the critical framework of Clement Greenberg.
On movement, trace, and the inscription of action.
Gesture records the movement of the body within the work. It is not depiction, but index—a trace of action, time, and intensity. The surface becomes a site of inscription, where meaning emerges through the immediacy of mark-making, as seen in the work of Jackson Pollock.
On expansion, continuity, and the dissolution of figure and ground.
The field replaces composition with extension. There is no central form, no hierarchy—only a continuous expanse where elements exist in relation without dominance. This condition is evident in color field painting, particularly in the work of Mark Rothko.
On substance, presence, and the work as object.
Materiality foregrounds the physical reality of the work—its texture, weight, and composition. The medium is no longer a vehicle for representation, but the content itself. This shift is radicalized in the work of Alberto Burri, where material becomes both form and meaning.
On repetition, sequence, and systematic variation.
Seriality organizes the work through repetition and incremental change. Meaning emerges not from a single form, but from its variation across a sequence. This logic is central to minimal and conceptual practices, exemplified in the work of Sol LeWitt.
On structure, neutrality, and infinite extension.
The grid imposes order without hierarchy. It eliminates compositional focus, distributing attention evenly across the surface. Rosalind Krauss identified the grid as emblematic of modern art’s will to silence narrative and illusion, a structure widely used by artists such as Piet Mondrian.
On chromatic relations, intensity, and spatial construction.
Color is no longer descriptive, but structural. It defines space, depth, and relation without recourse to form. In abstraction, color becomes a primary agent of meaning, reaching a meditative and immersive intensity in the work of Mark Rothko.
On dispersion, anti-hierarchy, and the refusal of focal point.
Non-composition rejects traditional organization. There is no center, no privileged element—only a field of equivalence. This dispersal challenges the viewer’s expectations of order, a condition present in all-over painting and theorized through modernist criticism by Clement Greenberg.
On becoming, transformation, and the work as event.
Process shifts focus from the finished object to its making. The work is understood as an unfolding action rather than a fixed form. This emphasis on temporality and transformation is central to postwar abstraction and process art, seen in practices like those of Eva Hesse.
On chance, openness, and the limits of control.
Indeterminacy introduces unpredictability into the work. Outcomes are not fully controlled, allowing chance and external conditions to shape the result. This destabilizes authorship and intention, a strategy explored across disciplines by figures such as John Cage.