‘To Bend The Ear Of The Outer World’
Abstraction was, at one point, radical. A seismic, violent rupture with the past; a visceral destruction of representational art, a new beginning. That was in the 1920s though. Is there anything interesting left to say with abstraction in 2023? Gagosian seems to think so, and this show promises to ‘examine the significance of abstract painting today’. There are big new works by big old names: a sploodgy mess of an ‘Abstraktes Bild’ by Gerhard Richter, a towering, fractured Frank Bowling, a little delicate Vija Celmins night sky (very distinctly not abstract). There are art market darlings like Wade Guyton, Mark Grotjahn and Christopher Wool. There are smears and splashes, calm considered marks, big violent gestures. Abstraction can be so many beautiful, affecting things, and there’s tons of all of that on display. But it’s a pretty damning indictment of the state of contemporary abstraction that this show would have looked almost identical in the 1980s. Some artists have pushed things a little, incorporated digital elements, or twisted the medium in weird new directions, but for the most part, this is an old-fashioned, hugely decorative exhibition. Abstraction has moved on since the 1980s, but you wouldn’t know it from most of what’s on show here. The thing is, abstraction has endured as a radical approach because contemporary artists have married it to conceptual approaches, using it to explore ideas of race, identity, sexuality, ecology, physicality, etc. etc. etc. The yo