Huffington Post | Art Basel Miami Beach 2017 : Where The Museums Come to Shop
December 14, 2017
We hope you will join us at Booth E6 from December 7–10.
In 1979, Robert Motherwell, speaking before a class at the New School, suggested that close analysis of the term “abstract”— derived from the Latin abstractus, meaning “to take from,” “to select from”— could yield a more open-ended definition of the genre. Postulating that all artists must undertake a process of selection, regardless of the realistic or non-figurative nature of their imagery, he explained: “[T]here is no communication, no work of art that’s not essentially ‘abstract’ by definition, abstracted for the purposes of emphasis.” Motherwell concluded that an artist’s imagination might counteract the art-historical legacy of representation. By understanding an artwork through the lens of immediate experience, he argued, its dynamic sensory elements would emerge as its foremost qualities, underscoring its profound effects in real time and space.
Lévy Gorvy's presentation, Abstracting the Real, brings together a range of artists who explore Motherwell's expanded definition of the abstract. Focusing on the postwar years in America and Europe, this selection celebrates those innovators — Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, François Morellet and Andy Warhol among them — who transformed the ways in which artworks interacted with their physical frames. The formal constructions of each artwork profess concerns simmering just beneath the surface: adopting a heroic rhetoric and sweeping scale, the New York School freed painting from its timeworn task of depiction, while Pop Art and Minimalism addressed the abiding influence of an artwork’s surroundings on both its content and the perceptual experience it affords. Together, these artists redefined art’s visual proximity to reality, asserting the artificiality of physical limitations to emphasize con- creteness, immediacy, and sensation over the remove of description.
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