Paths to Abstraction

Venue: Art Galley of NSW, The Domain, Sydney
Dates: 26 June - 19 September 2010
Cost: $20 per person; $15 concessions

One of the most ambitious exhibitions the Art Gallery of New South Wales has ever undertaken, Paths to Abstraction opens this month. Spanning 50 years when paintings, drawings and prints edged their way by degrees towards purely non-representational images, the exhibition will include more than 150 pivotal works by some of the most influential pioneers of modernism.

Curator Terence Maloon has secured representative works of more than 40 of the leading artists of the late 19th and 20th centuries including Whistler, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Munch, Gauguin, Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Derain, Denis, Marc, Duchamp, Braque, Bonnard and Mondrian among others.

These works come from 59 institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Museu Picasso Barcelona; Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou; Tate Modern; Tate Britain; Kunstmuseum Bern; J Paul Getty Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum as well as private collections.

In the first decades of the 20th century, a radical new approach to art emerged almost simultaneously across Europe and the United States: abstraction. Yet abstraction was never a ‘movement’, it didn’t originate in one place, nor was it practised by one cohesive group of artists.

So how had these artists arrived at such a convergence? How had abstract art taken root so quickly?

Paths to Abstraction explores the avant-garde movements and artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that preceded and paved the way for purely abstract art.

Covering the period from 1867 to 1917, Paths to Abstraction presents a survey of the evolution towards an entirely non-figurative art. Although many of the artists who are featured never produced entirely abstract paintings, their work, in its time, demonstrated an unprecedented degree of abstraction, and was an inspiration to the first generation of truly abstract artists: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Kupka, Larionov, Klee, Arp and Picabia, whose work is also featured.

Image: Patrick Henry Bruce: 'Painting' 1917–18, oil and graphite on canvas, 65.1 x 81.6 cm Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J Terra Collection (1999.21)