CRITIQUES OF PURE ABSTRACTION
Painters including American Arthur Dove, Russian Wassily Kandinsky, Russian Kasimir Malevich,
and Dutch Piet Mondrian pioneered pure abstraction in the second decade of the 20th century.
This start influenced a generation of painters, sculptors, architects, and designers who have
used simple geometric forms and broad expanses of unmodulated color without apparent references
to the world of appearances. The visual purity-its absence of signs of anecdotal
life-has expressed notions of spirituality, idealism, and utopian longing. In post-war America,
the group broadly labeled abstract expressionism considered abstraction the vehicle through art
for personal liberation.
Abstraction flourished even in the face of many competing aesthetic impulses and virtually dominated
20th century modernisn. But many artists-especially from the 1950s and 1960s onward-have vigorously
debated abstraction, undercutting, deconstructing, and quoting it.
The outlook espoused by many artists today approaches the earnest seriousness of abstraction with
skepticism. The character of abstraction itself, an hallmark of modernism, has become a favorite
subject for interrogation in the hands of many contemporary artists.
Critiques of Pure Abstraction presents a sampling of artists who continue to practice abstraction,
but seek to reform it to make it responsive to contemporary issues.
Some mock the style as if it were the antiquated practice of an age long gone. Others investigate
its basic nature. All offer a dialogue with abstraction as well as criticism, together forming a
group of critiques. Early proponents of a critical approach to abstraction represented here include
artists Richard Artschwager, Jonathan Borofsky, Daniel Buren, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, and Nam
June Paik. Also featured are recent works by Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, Rachel
Lachowicz, Jonathan Lasker, Annette Lemieux, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Mark Milloff, David Reed,
David Row, Andres Serrano, and Rosemarie Trockel, who share an attitude that is cool, dispassionate,
and guarded, yet attentive to history.
Critiques of Pure Abstraction is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent
Curators Incorporated (ICI), New York, a non-profit traveling exhibition service specializing
in contemporary art. Guest curator for the exhibition is Mark Rosenthal, Curator, Solomon
Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York City.
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