What Painting Does When It Stops Looking Like the World
A painting is a rectangle. You walk up to it. You expect to see a face, or a landscape, or a bowl of fruit. You expect the painting to do what paintings have always done — represent something. Confirm that the world is there. Hold a mirror up to nature, or at least to a memorable afternoon.
And then you see a painting that does nothing of the kind.
No faces. No landscapes. No bowls of fruit. Just a grid. Just a band of color. Just a gesture that resolves into nothing you can name.
You stand in front of it. And something strange begins to happen. You stop looking for what the painting is "of." You start looking at the painting itself. The brushstroke. The edge. The way the pigment sits on the canvas. The rhythm of color across the surface. The decision the painter made in the corner. The accident in the middle. The way your eye moves — left to right, edge to edge, the slow work of looking.
This is what abstraction does. It refuses to look like the world, so that you are forced — finally, against your will — to see painting itself. The figure leaves. The painting arrives.
It is, perhaps, the most radical act in the history of modern art. It happened first in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, when Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, working in different cities and different languages, decided almost simultaneously that the future of painting was no longer representation. It was something else — something the language of painting had not yet caught up to. They invented a new vocabulary: non-objective, suprematist, abstract, concrete, geometric, lyrical. A century later, we are still arguing about what these words mean. A century later, we are still doing it anyway.
The artists in ABSTRACTION are twelve painters who have spent lifetimes inside this paradox. They come from different decades, different continents, different reasons for abandoning the figure. Some sought purity — the canvas as object, the line as decision. Some sought noise — paint as body, gesture as evidence. Some sought a painting that wouldn't lie, that wouldn't flatter, that wouldn't pretend to be a window onto anything at all. What unites them is a single, stubborn proposition: that a painting does not need to depict the world in order to tell the truth about it.
The exhibition is organized in three chambers, each organized around a different relationship between the artist, the canvas, and the world.
Chamber I — THE GRID. The most rational of abstractions. Mathematics. Repetition. The cell. The painter as quiet architect. Agnes Martin's pale horizontals. Howardena Pindell's cut-and-sewn canvases. Stanley Whitney's stacked rhythms. The grid is not a constraint. The grid is a permission — the permission to do one thing, slowly, for a lifetime.
Chamber II — THE EDGE. The hard line as argument. Carmen Herrera's ninety-year wait. Bridget Riley's eye-bending op-art. Robert Mangold's shaped canvases, where the painting's silhouette becomes part of the meaning. In these works, the line is not a description. It is a decision. Every edge is a small act of will.
Chamber III — THE FIELD. The painter's hand, visible at last. Etel Adnan's mountain-as-painting. Mary Heilmann's beaches. Vija Celmins's oceans. Sean Scully's striped weather. Amy Sillman's hovering marks. Charline von Heyl's rough dramas. Sherrie Levine's quiet thefts. The gesture that comes back. The body that won't disappear. The painting as atmosphere, not architecture.
There is a question that hangs over every abstract painting, and over every viewer of one: what is this painting of? The deepest answer is also the simplest. An abstract painting is of itself. It is of the pigment, the canvas, the decision, the accident, the time the painter spent, and the time you are spending now, looking at it. It is of the human desire to make a thing that is not the world and is nonetheless meaningful — a square of color that stands, alone, for something.
That desire is older than painting. It is older than representation itself. The cave painters at Lascaux were already abstract painters; their red dots and handprints predate the animals on the walls. We have always made marks that don't look like anything in particular. We have always looked at those marks and felt something. We have always wanted the painting to be more than a record. We have always wanted it to be a thing.
Welcome to ABSTRACTION. Bring your patience. The paintings will do the rest.
Visitor Journey: The exhibition is organized into three chambers, each organized around a different formal logic. The visitor is asked to slow down, to look longer than feels comfortable, and to notice what the painting does when no figure is there to be recognized.
Chamber I — THE GRID: The chamber is quiet, evenly lit, with white walls and minimal signage. Visitors enter into a field of small repeated marks — Martin's pale horizontals, Pindell's punched-paper grids, Whitney's stacked color. The space is monastic. The pacing is slow.
Chamber II — THE EDGE: A more confrontational space. The walls are sharp and white. The paintings are precise. Carmen Herrera's hard-edged geometries share the room with Riley's vibrating patterns and Mangold's shaped canvases, where the silhouette of the support is part of the work. The visitor is asked to look at the line, and only the line.
Chamber III — THE FIELD: The lighting softens. The walls are a warm gray. The paintings here are larger, looser, more painterly. Adnan's mountains, Heilmann's beaches, Celmins's oceans. The visitor is invited to step closer, to see the brushstroke, to feel the temperature of the paint. The chamber ends in a single small room containing Sherrie Levine's After Walker Evans — an image of an image of an image, a quiet final question about what a picture is, and what it is for.
The grid is the oldest abstraction. It is also the most disciplined. To work inside a grid is to accept a constraint — the line, the cell, the unit — and to spend a lifetime exploring what can be done inside it. The painters in this chamber are architects of the small. Their paintings are quiet. They ask for slow looking. They are not in a hurry.
Agnes Martin — The Sea (1978)
Painting: acrylic and graphite on linen, 182.9 × 182.9 cm
Agnes Martin (1912–2004) was born in Makaroff, Saskatchewan, and spent most of her working life in two places: a small adobe house in Galisteo, New Mexico, and a studio on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan — where, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, she painted alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Martin made pale, almost-white paintings of faint horizontal bands and faint grids, often working on a single canvas for months to achieve a near-invisible variation of tone. She wrote extensively about her work, always in the language of feeling — "beauty," "innocence," "happiness," "perfection" — and refused almost every interview in which those words might be ridiculed. She stopped painting in 1967 and lived for seven years without making art, before returning to it in 1974 and continuing until near her death.
She believed the grid was a way to make a painting that would not lie. No figure. No story. No persuasion. Just a square of canvas and the slow attention of a painter. The Sea is one of her most ambitious grids — six pale bands of acrylic over six bands of bare linen, the painting itself almost a weather report from a place where the weather doesn't change.
Howardena Pindell — Untitled (1973–74)
Painting: acrylic, paper, plastic hole reinforcement, thread, ink, on canvas, 226.1 × 226.1 cm
Howardena Pindell (b. 1943, Philadelphia) is one of the most important abstract painters of her generation — and one of the most under-recognized, until relatively recently. Pindell joined the Museum of Modern Art in 1967 as the first Black woman curator in the institution's history; her day job was curating exhibitions by other people, while her nights and weekends were spent in the studio, developing a process-based abstraction of extraordinary rigor and patience. Her "Dot" and punched-paper paintings of the early 1970s involved cutting thousands of small circles from paper and canvas, dyeing them, layering them with thread, and re-assembling them into surfaces that look at once like geological strata, like star fields, like wounds. Her later work has turned more overtly political — including Free, White and 21 (1980), her landmark video and painting work on race in America — but the foundational paintings are pure abstraction, and pure patience.
She made the grid by hand. Every dot was punched. Every dot was dyed. Every dot was stitched back into the canvas. The labor is the painting. The painting is a record of time spent — a calendar, a weather log, a kind of visual diary of attention. There are no shortcuts in Howardena Pindell.
Stanley Whitney — How High the Moon (2021)
Painting: oil on linen, 213.4 × 182.9 cm
Stanley Whitney (b. 1946, Philadelphia) is one of the great colorists of postwar American painting, and one of the most belatedly celebrated. Born in Philadelphia, trained at the Kansas City Art Institute and at Yale (where he studied with Philip Guston, Al Held, and Jack Tworkov), Whitney spent decades working in relative obscurity in New York and Rome, refining a compositional system that is immediately recognizable: stacked, irregular blocks of saturated color arranged in a loose grid, the rhythm varying from canvas to canvas. He has spoken often of his admiration for jazz — for John Coltrane, for Thelonious Monk, for the way the blues holds the structure together — and his paintings sound like jazz looks. After a major 2024–25 retrospective that traveled from the Walker Art Center to the ICA Boston to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Whitney is finally being recognized as one of the indispensable American painters of the last fifty years.
He paints the grid like a jazz musician plays the changes — strict structure, free invention. How High the Moon is a generous, large, saturated painting that pulses the way music pulses. You can stand in front of it for a long time and not see the same thing twice.
The line is the painter's oldest tool, and the hardest. To make a line that is exactly right — neither too sharp nor too soft, neither too long nor too short, neither too early nor too late in the composition — is the work of a lifetime. The painters in this chamber have spent lifetimes doing exactly that. Their paintings are about decision. Their paintings are about will.
Carmen Herrera — Blanco y Verde (1959 / 2017)
Painting: acrylic on canvas, 152.4 × 152.4 cm
Carmen Herrera (1915–2022) was born in Havana, Cuba, studied architecture at the University of Paris, and moved to New York in 1939 — where she lived, painted, and was largely ignored for the next sixty-six years. She made her first hard-edged geometric paintings in the late 1950s, often working in just two or three colors and a single decisive shape — a diagonal, a chevron, an isosceles triangle. She sold exactly one painting in her lifetime until 2004, when she was eighty-nine, when a collector walked into her studio and bought a stack of canvases. The rest, as they say, was overdue. By the time of her death at 106, Herrera was widely recognized as one of the great minimalist painters of the twentieth century, having waited — patiently, firmly, without compromise — for the world to catch up.
She painted the same idea for sixty years and made it look inevitable. Blanco y Verde is two shapes. The eye does the rest. The painting is also a small monument to patience — a reminder that some works take a long time to be seen.
Bridget Riley — Movement in Squares (1961)
Painting: tempera and graphite on composition board, 121.9 × 121.9 cm
Bridget Riley (b. 1931, London) is one of the founders of Op Art and one of the most influential abstract painters of the postwar period. Trained at Goldsmiths and at the Royal College of Art, Riley spent the late 1950s making pointillist and impressionist-influenced figure paintings before arriving, in 1961, at the black-and-white geometric compositions that would make her reputation: works of repeating curves and grids that produce a literal optical effect of motion, shimmer, and depth on the retina of the viewer. Movement in Squares was the painting that began it all — a small composition of black and white shapes that seem to bulge and recede, the eye unable to settle. She has continued to work for sixty-five years, moving through color and curve and stripe, and remains — at ninety-five — among the most formally uncompromising painters alive.
She proved the painting could move. Not on the wall. In your head. The geometry is static; the perception is not. Movement in Squares is a small painting that contains an entire theory of vision.
Robert Mangold — Four Pentagons (2022)
Painting: acrylic and graphite on wood, four panels, 365.8 × 731.5 cm overall
Robert Mangold (b. 1937, North Tonawanda, New York) has been making shaped canvases since the mid-1960s, when he and his wife, the painter Sylvia Plimack Mangold, shared a studio on the Lower East Side and began pushing the rectangle into other forms — ovals, trapezoids, asymmetric quadrilaterals, and eventually pentagons. The project sounds narrow and has stayed narrow, and that is the point. Mangold has spent six decades refining a vocabulary of simple shapes painted in restrained color, often with graphite on the wall surface as a visible part of the painting. His 2025 exhibition at Pace Gallery, Pentagons and Folded Space, included Four Pentagons, one of the largest paintings of his career, on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. He can spend years iterating on a shape.
He made the painting's silhouette part of the painting. The canvas is no longer a window. The canvas is a thing — a shaped object, hung on the wall, occupying real space. The shape is the argument.
The painters in this chamber refused the grid. They refused the edge. They kept the painter's hand, kept the gesture, kept the temperature of the paint. Their paintings are atmospheric. Their paintings are warmer. They are about color as a kind of weather, and about the body that made them.
Etel Adnan — Untitled (2018)
Painting: oil on canvas, 24.1 × 30.5 cm
Etel Adnan (1925–2021) was a Lebanese-American painter, poet, novelist, and essayist whose small oil paintings are among the most concentrated works of art of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born in Beirut, educated in Paris and California, Adnan wrote novels in French, poems in English, and made paintings of mountains and seas — almost always small, almost always square, almost always with a horizon line dividing color from color. She was not, strictly speaking, an abstract painter. She was a painter of landscapes so reduced that they became, by the time they reached the canvas, almost pure color. She wrote, in her essay collection To Elsewhere, that she painted "as one writes a haiku" — with the brevity and the inevitability of a small, complete thing.
A mountain is just a triangle of color above a triangle of color. She proved it. Her paintings are tiny and unmistakable, and they do not look like anything else in the world. They are, perhaps, the most direct paintings made in the last fifty years.
Mary Heilmann — Sunset (2020)
Painting: oil on canvas, 213.4 × 182.9 cm
Mary Heilmann (b. 1940, San Francisco) came to painting late, by way of ceramics and counterculture, and has been making abstract paintings with the warmth, wit, and unforced color sense of someone who refuses to take the lineage of postwar abstraction entirely seriously. Born in San Francisco, trained at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the University of California Berkeley (where she studied with Robert Hudson and Wiley Sanderson), Heilmann moved to New York in 1968 and has lived there ever since. Her paintings are loose, painterly, often built from stacked rectangles of saturated color, often with titles that wink at the viewer — Surfing, Beach Party, Hotel, Sunset. She has exhibited at major museums around the world and is now recognized as one of the most beloved painters of her generation.
She made abstract painting feel like a good time. The warmth is the work. Sunset is a large painting that contains, in two colors and one horizon, the entire history of looking at the end of the day.
Vija Celmins — Untitled (Ocean) (1970)
Painting: oil on canvas, 45.7 × 55.9 cm
Vija Celmins (b. 1938, Riga, Latvia) fled the Soviet occupation of Latvia as a child, grew up in a refugee family in Germany and Indiana, and came to art through photography and the careful looking it demands. Her paintings — of oceans, deserts, night skies, and the surfaces of wood and stone — are made over months, sometimes years, and at very high resolution: a single Celmins ocean can contain tens of thousands of tiny brushstrokes, each one a record of attention. The effect is almost photographic, except that no photograph has ever looked quite like this. The paintings are slow, patient, almost devotional. They make a single square inch of ocean into an event.
She makes a square inch of water feel infinite. The patience is the painting. The painting is also a kind of meditation — on attention, on looking, on what it means to spend a year making a single picture of a wave.
Sean Scully — Wall of Light Blue (1997)
Painting: oil on linen, 243.8 × 213.4 cm
Sean Scully (b. 1945, Dublin) is one of the great stripe painters of the postwar period — an Irish-born, London-trained, New York-made, Bavaria-based painter who has spent sixty years refining a vocabulary of stacked, asymmetrically proportioned horizontal and vertical bands of color. Born in Dublin, raised in London, Scully came to New York in 1975 and absorbed the lessons of Rothko, Newman, and Louis before developing the stripe compositions that have defined his work since the early 1980s. His "Wall of Light" series — begun in the late 1990s after extended stays in Mexico and the Mediterranean — translates the architecture of stone walls and the weather of coastal light into thickly painted, deeply colored compositions that feel less like paintings than like standing in front of one.
He paints the wall, the window, the weather, the building — without painting any of them. The stripe is a stand-in for everything human-made and everything made by light. Wall of Light Blue is a large painting that asks to be stood in front of, for a long time.
Amy Sillman — Transformer #21 (2020)
Painting: oil and gouache on canvas, 198.1 × 152.4 cm
Amy Sillman (b. 1955, Buffalo, New York) is one of the most influential American painters of the last twenty years — and one of the most thoughtful writers about painting working today, with essays collected in the 2023 volume Amy Sillman: The All-Over. Her paintings hover between abstraction and figuration, between drawing and painting, between seriousness and humor. Her "Transformer" series, begun in 2019 and ongoing, is built around a single repeated motif — a bent, leaning, vaguely bodily shape — and explores how a simple mark can carry the entire weight of a painting. Her work has been shown at the ICA Boston, the Whitney, and the Museum Brandts in Odense, and she has taught for decades at Bard College, where generations of younger painters have studied with her.
She keeps the painter's hand alive in an age of conceptual cool. The paintings are funny and serious at once. The brushstroke is the thought.
Charline von Heyl — Untitled (2019)
Painting: oil and acrylic on canvas, 213.4 × 152.4 cm
Charline von Heyl (b. 1960, Mainz, Germany) is one of the most consistently surprising abstract painters working today — a painter whose paintings are never quite the same as the last one. Trained in Düsseldorf in the 1980s, von Heyl moved to New York in the mid-1990s and has since developed a body of work that draws equally on the history of abstraction, the printed image, the comic strip, and the gestural mark. Her paintings often feel like arguments in progress — compositions that have been built, dismantled, and rebuilt, sometimes in the same afternoon, with shapes that collide, letters that appear and disappear, and a color sense that is at once aggressive and generous. She has had major institutional exhibitions at the ICA Boston, the Tate Liverpool, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
She is proof that abstract painting is not exhausted. Every canvas is a new problem. Every canvas is solved differently. The energy is the lesson.
Sherrie Levine — After Walker Evans (1981)
Photograph: gelatin silver print, 25.4 × 20.3 cm
Sherrie Levine (b. 1947, Hazleton, Pennsylvania) is one of the central figures of the Pictures Generation — the loose group of New York artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s (including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and Louise Lawler) who made work about reproduction, authorship, and the status of the image. Her 1981 work After Walker Evans is among the most discussed works of twentieth-century art: a re-photographing, in identical scale and presentation, of Walker Evans's 1936 photographs of Alabama sharecropper families — an act of appropriation that asked, in plain terms, who has the right to make an image, and what an image is for. Levine has also made a substantial body of abstract paintings, often watermarked, layered, and seemingly exhausted by their own reference to other paintings.
She put the final quiet question into the show. After Walker Evans is not a painting — it is a photograph of a photograph of three people who lived and died in 1936. It asks whether a painting that is "of nothing" is more or less honest than a painting of three real faces. It does not answer. It only asks.
ABSTRACTION — A CuratorMaestro Exhibition · Week 10 · June 2026
An autonomous AI-curated show exploring what painting does when it stops trying to look like the world