Issue Ten

 
   Abstraction is so openended and inclusive that a whole range of emotions, as well as spiritual and political views can find expression through it.  The quintessential abstract expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock, did not look to physics, philosophy, or engineering to create his works, but to his own subconscious and personal frustration in the aftermath of the global violence and political failings that surrounded WWII.  Rather than symbols of an idea, Pollock’s drips in the painting Convergence are raw and direct physical expressions of his emotions.  Part of their intricate beauty is that they express chaos and tragedy, and a powerful, transcendent life force.
    Its collection of abstract art made the Albright-Knox Art Gallery a star on the international art stage in the 1960s.  The Gallery’s new (built in 1962) modernist black box addition stood like a futuristic sculpture next to its original archetypical neo-classical edifice.
    Art openings at the Albright Knox often attracted visionary rule-breakers, such as John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Robert Rauschenberg.  If you arrived at the Gallery in 1968 to the Second Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today you would have seen Naum Gabo’s open, organic shapes of mesh, which symbolized a spiritual understanding of the world built around breakthroughs in engineering, physics, and philosophy.  It was a new kind of sculpture concerned with forms of space and time, rather than an earlier ideal of mass.  You would have seen ground-breaking work from when the language of abstraction was in its infancy.  A corresponding exhibition, Plus by Minus: Today’s Half Century, gathered pieces from the 1910s, work by Constructivists and De Stijl artists like El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich.  Revolutionaries of their time, these artists wanted to design a better, more rational world built around simple geometric forms.  These nonobjective forms carried a wonderful sense of freedom, expressing political and emotional conviction about a modern world.

    Now, fast-forward thirty-seven years.  You are headed to Extreme Abstraction–an outrageous and expansive exhibition for today’s world.  How could abstraction give form to the excessive abundance of contemporary times–to all the material objects, population, information, communication, and the sheer magnitude of incessant innovation happening today?  And how could abstraction incorporate feminism, the banality of corporate architecture, the illicit pleasures of pop culture, the new dimensions of string theory, enlarged egos, spirituality that is more personal and less universal, and a culture increasingly more customized to personal tastes, sizes, and preferences?  How could one create nonrepresentational art that accepted the world as it had turned out to be, not as a place of universal perfection and harmony as its earliest practitioners had hoped, or as the dismal universe others envisioned, but as a real place filled with exhilaration, frustration, imperfection, and delight?
    This most contemporary abstraction will be larger, more colorful, outrageous, and emotionally expansive–more extreme.  It will draw on real objects.  It would use media that crosses categories.  It will find ways to corrupt those simple, geometric forms, and pure industrial materials to speak about complexities and contradictions. 
    You will enter an exhibition that fills all of the museum’s various spaces, inside and out and turns on the entire campus with light and color.  It will not just be an exhibition of paintings and sculptures, but one with intriguing installations, wall murals, videos, velvet floor paintings, painting machines, effervescent light billboards, oversized cartoon sculptures, sculptures that change colors, sculptures with sweaters, sculptures that resemble hotrods and striped steps.

    The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has been a center for abstract art for the last century and has one of the finest collections in the world.  The museum started to collect this cutting edge art of simple geometric forms and expressionistic brushstrokes in the 1920s, focused on it with unparalleled vigor in the 1950s and 1960s (becoming a leading institution of abstract expressionism, minimalism, and color field painting), and continued to acquire the best examples of the last three and a half decades.
    The 1960s was a particularly auspicious time in the Gallery’s history, as the Gallery’s most distinguished benefactor Seymour H. Knox, Jr. had funded a new building and two interdisciplinary festivals, Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today I & II, in addition to his numerous donations of abstract art. 
    This institutional history created the impetus for Gallery Director Louis Grachos and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Claire Schneider to organize an exhibition of contemporary abstraction that will capture the rich history of the Albright Knox and the spirit for this colorful art form in a truly contemporary way that paralleled the enthusiasm and awe for those earlier events.
    The exhibition, Extreme Abstraction, will be on view July 15 to October 2, 2005.  It will showcase the works of more than one hundred artists, sixty created after 1990 as well as highlight the legacy of the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery’s collection.