Abstract

Abstraction is an artistic language that abandons the recognizable depiction of the material world and constructs the image from the pure means of painting and drawing: color, line, plane, rhythm and texture. Instead of imitating nature, an abstract work appeals to inner experience, musical association or spiritual idea, asserting the self-sufficiency of formal elements. Historically two principal currents are distinguished: lyrical, or organic, abstraction with flowing colored patches and an expressive gesture, and geometric abstraction with clear figures, right angles and calibrated proportions. The style's hallmarks are an open composition, the autonomous voice of color, attention to the very process of applying paint, and the refusal of narrative. Technically artists employ washes, dripping, collage, monochrome fields or, conversely, contrasting juxtapositions of tone. Wassily Kandinsky, for whom color carried a "spiritual sound," is regarded as the founder; alongside him worked Piet Mondrian with his Neoplasticism and Robert Delaunay with Orphism. In the Ukrainian context abstract inquiry involves Kazimir Malevich and his Suprematism, as well as Alexandra Exter, whose non-objective compositions fused color and dynamism. In the second half of the twentieth century abstraction unfolded in American Abstract Expressionism through Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Abstraction permanently changed ideas about what could be the subject of art, opening the way to non-objective painting, color field and minimalism.