Paying Homage to the Iconoclasts of Abstraction

24 hours ago7 min read2 comments

The gallery walls hum with a kind of silent, electric defiance, a quality that has always separated the true innovators from the mere stylists. A new exhibition, a quiet powerhouse of curation, traces the radical advancements in painting by four such iconoclasts: Al Held, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, and Frank Stella.This isn't a mere retrospective; it's an argument, a carefully mounted thesis on the moment painting broke its own frame, both literally and figuratively. To walk through the rooms is to witness the slow, deliberate shattering of the picture plane, a revolution that began with Stella's infamous pronouncement, 'What you see is what you see.' His early, pinstriped canvases, like minimalist manifestos, rejected illusionistic space with the cold precision of a strategist, forcing the conversation away from representation and toward the objecthood of the painting itself. Then comes Al Held, whose monumental, architectonic abstractions, such as the formidable 'The Seventh Step,' feel less like paintings and more like blueprints for impossible cities, their hard-edged geometries constructing vast, unentered spaces that challenge the viewer's perception of depth without a single trick of the eye.But the true emotional core of the show often pulses from the work of Elizabeth Murray and Judy Pfaff, who took the baton of rebellion and ran in wildly different, yet equally vital, directions. Murray’s shaped canvases are a form of domestic surrealism; they bulge, buckle, and cartoonishly erupt from the wall, transforming the language of abstract expressionism into something deeply personal, almost whimsical, yet structurally audacious.Pfaff, meanwhile, is the installation alchemist, whose sprawling, chaotic, and breathtaking assemblages refuse to be contained, dripping off the canvas and into the gallery space with a wild, organic energy that feels like a garden run riot in a machine shop. What the exhibition posits, with compelling evidence, is that these artists were not simply working in parallel; they were part of a continuous, multi-generational dialogue, each responding to and pushing beyond the constraints acknowledged by the last.They asked not what a painting should look like, but what it could be—an object, an environment, a psychological landscape. In an art world currently obsessed with figurative resurgence and digital realms, this gathering of works serves as a crucial reminder of the raw, intellectual and physical courage it took to dismantle tradition and rebuild it into something thrillingly, and permanently, new.

#featured

#Al Held

#Elizabeth Murray

#Judy Pfaff

#Frank Stella

#abstract art

#exhibition

#painting

#iconoclasts

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