Abstract Art

Expansion and the permanent crossing of boundaries, freedom and autonomy form the cornerstones of Grosse’s (* 1961) oeuvre. Her creative work is experimental and unpredictable. With many photos from the artist’s private archive this volumes provides a profound insight into her working method, her sources of inspiration and the processes through which she generates her ideas.

The spiritually inspired pictures of Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) have their roots in the desert of California, a place where the artist settled in 1932 and where she lived until her death. She wrote of her highly symbolic paintings that her pictures were “like little windows”, which opened up a view into the interior, her “message of light to the world”.

"Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962" delves into the various circles of artists who lived in France following World War II. Featuring new scholarship and illuminating essays, this groundbreaking volume illustrates many of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photos, and films produced during these fertile years.

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist will be the first survey of this under recognized American painter in over 22 years. Her distinctive paintings could be described as metaphysical landscapes rooted in the California desert near Cathedral City. Pelton chiefly drew on her own inspirations, superstitions, and beliefs to exemplify emotional states.

Katharina Grosse (*1961) is considered to be one of the defining painters of her generation; her powerfully colourful interventions have had a determining effect on contemporary art dialogue. Grosse’s works cross the boundaries of space and concept with expansive gestures and enormous vitality and call for a new reception culture.  

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is one of the most influential protagonists of the avant-garde, both as an artist and an author. With his utopia of the total Merz vision of the world he aimed at the unification of art and non-art. The art of assemblage and material art reached its first high point in his work; his Merzbau is regarded as a forerunner of present-day installations.

In 1926 22 year-old Dutch artist Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) travelled to the USA on a British freighter – without papers and hidden in the machine room. The young art student eked out a living by painting houses, signs and façades, before he was able after eight years to dedicate himself entirely to painting.  

Gerhard Richter (*1932) is an exceptional personality – not because his pictures are world famous, but because he has demonstrated a new approach to painting. His art masterfully moves between abstraction and representation, sensuousness and denial – ambivalent attitudes which he demonstrated even in his early work.

Vasily Kandinsky became the pioneer of abstract art; he was a co-founder of the Blauer Reiter, an art theorist and an influential teacher at the Bauhaus. When he abandoned his promising career as a lawyer in favour of art at the age of 30, no one could have guessed that a few years later he would play a decisive role in determining and revolutionising twentieth-century art.