Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art from the Permanent Collection an exhibition on view Friday, July 12, through Sunday, September 8.
With “Pictures of Nothing” the Art Center will trace the evolution and development of abstract art from nine decades of the twentieth century, through close to fifty artworks in such media as painting, sculpture, photography, and prints. The exhibition divides the art into three sections — focusing on gesture, geometry, and pattern — in order to highlight the different formal characteristics among these groups of works. Examples (respectively by sections of the exhibition) include artworks by Helen Frankenthaler, Nancy Graves, Grace Hartigan, Brice Marden, and Robert Motherwell (gesture); Peter Halley, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Anne Truitt, and Josef Albers (geometry); and Jasper Johns, Yayoi Kusama, Mark Tobey, and Terry Winters (pattern).
The exhibition’s approach is to showcase varieties of artistic abstraction that emerged over the last century, and to highlight the distinctions among them — from surrealism, abstract expressionism, and geometric abstraction, to color-field and hard-edge painting and minimalism. Surrealist works, for example, show an interest in such technical devices as “automatism” and in psychological theories about the role of the unconscious and archetypal inner sources; the gestural style of action painters reveals their attempts to transfer pure emotion and internal creative energies into their art to convey the direct immediacy of the moment of creation; hard-edge paintings display an economy of form, fullness of color, and smooth surface planes; and minimalist works use spare abstraction to expose the essence of form.
Much of the art to be shown in “Pictures of Nothing” was created in the middle of the twentieth century, during the glory days of abstract painting in New York, but the exhibition will wholly span works from the 1930s to the 2010s. Among them, two have a very special relationship. Robert Delaunay’s 1937 painting Rhythme inspired Complete Coverage on Delaunay, a sculpture created by Uruguayan-born Marco Maggi for his one-person exhibition held in 2011 at the Art Center (http://fllac.vassar.edu/exhibitions/2011-2012/marco-maggi.html). With seventy-four years between these two colorful works, they act as fascinating bookends for abstract art in Vassar’s permanent collection. http://fllac.vassar.edu
