CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Gestural Abstraction
Recent abstract painting driven by the visible movement of the hand and arm, in sweeping strokes, scribbles, drips and smears.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Gesture had a long life before Abstract Expressionism made it famous. Chinese and Japanese calligraphers prized the energy of a single brushstroke for centuries, and Wassily Kandinsky called some early abstractions Improvisations. After 1945 painters in New York, Paris and Osaka made the stroke itself the subject.
Contemporary painters treat gesture with more self-awareness. Jonathan Lasker sets thick, squiggling lines of paint against flat grounds, turning a spontaneous-looking mark into something planned and repeated. Martha Jungwirth, in Vienna, applies loose, blotted strokes of oil and watercolour, often on paper, leaving large areas bare. Mary Weatherford brushes broad veils of paint across canvases and mounts glowing neon tubes on them. Amy Sillman and Cecily Brown move between abstraction and half-seen bodies with layered, reworked strokes. Look for speed, pressure and direction: where the brush starts and stops, whether marks are sprayed, dragged or scraped, and signs of correction.
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