Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky is often recognized as the father of abstract art, but Swedish mystic Hilda af Klint beat him to the starting line by about four years. Known in her lifetime as a landscape painter and portraitist, Klint shocked the world in 1986 when her abstract experimentations resurfaced decades after the artist’s death. While her contemporaries published manifestos and exhibited widely during the early 20th century, Klint kept her ground-breaking work private, sensing it would receive harsh criticism from a male-dominated industry.
The world wasn’t ready for Klint in 1906, but her work has surged in popularity since its discovery in the 1980s. Abstract art has evolved in scope since then, but a near-mystical devotion to the language of symbols, shapes, and colors unites their work. Our ninth exhibition of 2024, New Shapes, looks at contemporary abstraction in all its strange, mutated forms. Rethinking the divide between figuration and abstraction, these artists ignore the label, focusing instead on the infinite options available in the 21st century. They explore abstraction in the digital age and use new research methods to generate patterns, designs, and evocative new compositions.
Bodies, Bodies, Bodies
The human body has appeared in art for thousands of years. When pure abstraction took the art world by storm in the 20th century, the figure went with it. Recent trends have seen the figure’s return, but these works abandon traditional portraiture, perceiving the body as a physical and symbolic territory where external systems of control manifest as psychic conditions.
Interdisciplinary artist Emily Elhoffer copes with dysphoria by using AI to distort images of her body. “I’m acutely aware of my body as it’s imagined in the minds of others, and I generate my own imagined bodies to counteract this ‘othering,’” she says. “These proxies are acts of self-imaging. A boundless contemporary framework of identity, or ‘self,’ is defined as something which is both experiential and socially programmed—an ever-metastasizing contradiction which leaves little room for me. Me: the subject and the object. Me: the vibrating desire between.”
Elsewhere in New Shapes, Andrea Coleman uses singed paper and a halo of smoldering colors to obscure an image of Sanders White, “who was burned in a furnace fire” on Chicago’s West Side. Jake Couri’s “Signs of a Leaky Gut” explores the human body as a site for endless data mining, a place for cold, steely optimization at any cost.
Abstract Sculpture
Abstract sculpture has evolved leaps and bounds since the 20th century since Modernist practitioners declared sculpture’s true purpose was to present “not the outer form but the idea, the essence of things.” Sculpture has been seen as an attempt to create consciousness and combine multiple perspectives into a unified reality. As human knowledge grew, so did our understanding of the infinite realities within and without us.
In New Shapes, glass artist Evan Seeling and woodworker Leo Louise Cunningham explore the complex microcosm of plant life cycles. Leo’s sculptures, including “Multitudes on Scrap II,” embrace “queerness and cooperation” in nature, often highlighting mutable organisms and processes hidden from view. “These sculptures honor mutations and multitudes as metaphors for non-conformity,” says Leo, adding, “This is a personal journey to dispel the inherited American myths of self-sufficiency and an ego-driven purpose.”
Elsewhere, Adrienne De Guevara explores the passage of time in “M-N-8,” a monochrome assemblage cobbled together with discarded, manmade materials. Similarly, Adam du Shole’s large, woodcut sculptures represent what he calls “an inventory of artifacts—slivers of the past whose origins have long been obscured.”
Mapping a Higher Reality
The earliest practitioners of abstract art, including Kandinsky and Klint, were heavily influenced by spiritual movements that had spread throughout Europe at the turn of the century. The artists included in New Shapes follow in their footsteps with transcendental work that searches for internal truth.
In his digital composite “Correspondence with Ghosts XI,” Quinn Keck layers paint over burned letters to a deceased friend, creating a haunting kaleidoscope of cryptic colors and empty shapes. “The final image echoes the infinite cosmos where the friend who has departed may reside,” Quinn says. “The piece speaks to loss and preserves the memory of both the person and letter writing rituals.”
Carmen Menza’s “Future Tense 1” explores climate change through light, reflective surfaces, and soundscapes. While the work appears transcendental, its ultimate purpose allows viewers to recognize and cultivate the divine on Earth. In “Beyond Capacity,” Coco Spadoni imagines a cozy liminal space where she can unplug from the world’s demands, while Philippe Halaburda’s “Hlf Ziyynn” maps the psychological conditions of an urban landscape.
Rhythm, Music, and Play
Artists who work in abstraction often use bold colors and loose, gestural mark-making to convey music, rhythm, and a sense of play or exploration. In “Burden,” John Gintoff layers pink and green scribbles over a photo collage, part of a series exploring “colors, widths, opacities, and transparencies, responding to the shapes beneath them.”
Nikki Painter’s small sculpture “Climb (Dream)” is a dream come true for trouble-makers who came of age in the ‘80s. Its neon colors, many windows, and multiple ladders feel like an invitation to play, get messy, make trouble. “These works are meant to feel like immersive spaces for the viewer, despite their diminutive size,” she says. “My visual style is rooted in eighties pop culture, referring to brightly colored cartoons and digital collage techniques that were hallmarks of music videos from that decade.” In contrast, Giulia Livi’s “Play Date” expresses a carefully constructed version of playtime that requires good manners and a measured sifting of sand.
All photos published with permission of the artist(s); featured graphics for New Shapes by David Schwartz.
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