Making a Mark: Abstraction in the Ahmanson Collection

Oct 1, 2022
1 min read

Updated: May 30

29 October 2022 - 1 March 2023

"The gathering of a group of paintings under the rubric of abstraction is not a benign curatorial conceit. Such an exhibition will, without a doubt, place its viewers in the uncomfortable position of being confronted by art objects rather than in control of them.1 Contemporary abstraction—whether it intends non-objectivity or non-representation, or exists outside of realism or representation altogether—sets one at odds with what one can see, or recognize, or physically intuit, confounding our expectations of an encounter with art. More than a century after painters, sculptors, mathematicians, and musicians began to chip away at the edges of the Western, Cartesian notion that we literally objectify and animate

the world with our gaze, this thinking still mediates and edits what we assume we know. Postmodernism’s complication of art’s values and meanings along with the ongoing enrichment that non-Western perspectives and practices continue to bring to contemporary art are starting to blur the line between the possessor and the possessed. But quite a bit of reprogramming is yet needed to expand and enrich our connection to things beyond “getting” them, in all senses of the term."

Excerpt from the essay “What is to replace the missing object?” byJennifer R. Gross

To view images from the show, click on the right arrow below.