Curated by Quentin Grosjean: Notes on Abstraction

 

MARUANI MERCIER is pleased to present Notes on Abstraction, a group exhibition opening in our Brussels gallery on 4th June. Bringing together some of the key exponents of international movements associated with abstract idiom, the exhibition features works executed between 1967 and the present day by artists including: Carl Andre, John Armleder, Lynda Benglis, Pam Glick, Peter Halley, Joseph Kosuth, Paul Mogensen, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Georg Karl Pfahler, Niele Toroni, Stanley Whitney, Sue Williams.

 

In his essay titled "Notes on Abstraction" from 1987, Peter Halley considered the notion of the ‘abstract’ as a mode of transitioning from the specific to the universal, from individual experience to its relation with the socio-political context of our society today. Challenging the vision of abstraction as a purely formal and autonomous pursuit, he writes, “the history of abstract art is the history of a real progression in the social. It is the history of the organization of the compartmentalized spaces and the formal systems that make up the abstract world.” The exhibition traces the heterogeneous terrain of contemporary abstraction: from Minimalism’s material and spatial logic to conceptual language, serial procedure and contemporary disruptions of form. Notes on Abstraction presents it as a set of recurring questions – about surface, structure, repetition, embodiment, and social relations – that continue to be reformulated across generations.