Gestural Abstraction: Making Their Mark I
Exploring the vibrant impact of artists in abstraction, this section highlights unique expressions and the profound social and emotional narratives behind their mark-making
Making Their Mark: New York Installation ViewShah Garg Foundation
Gestural abstraction
Abstraction has long served as a powerful mode of artistic expression, yet during the mid-twentieth century, movements like Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Color Field painting often overshadowed diverse voices, especially women.
From the energetic brushstrokes of Mary Weatherford to the technologically rendered precision of Aria Dean, the works in this section elevate mark making to new heights with social, political, and emotional resonances.
UntitledShah Garg Foundation
An artistic bloom in Vétheuil
Joan Mitchell is widely recognized as one of the preeminent abstract painters of the postwar period. Her arrival to Vétheuil, near Giverny, France in the late 1960s coincided with the emergence of sunflowers in her work.
Untitled—one of her final diptychs—contains pared-down versions of the sunflower form. The artist applied each mark with her signature confidence, while drips of excess paint stand as a testament to the unrelenting ambition and physicality of her painting process. As she had said, “My paintings aren’t about art issues, they’re about a feeling."
Among the Multitude VIShah Garg Foundation
Visions of conflict: borders, detention, and resistance
Executed with jagged black marks over a blood-red and sea-blue airbrushed ground, Among the Multitude IV draws on images documenting migrant detention centers at U.S. borders and the violence of far-right anti-immigration protests.
Mehretu begins her process of digital manipulation by using Adobe Photoshop software. Once satisfied with her editing, she projects the imagery onto a canvas and traces it or airbrushes it on with the guidance of a grid. This serves as a ground that she builds up with further airbrushing, screen printing, and brushstrokes of acrylic paint and ink in a labor-intensive process of layering and erasure.
A playful punch at monumentality
Little Island/Gut Punch, by the American artist Aria Dean, is painted chroma key green—the same color used for green screen.
Formally, it is a simple, erect rectangular solid, roughly the size of the artist’s body—but one that appears to have been struck forcefully in its middle so that it is beginning to collapse in on itself (hence, the “gut punch”).
“The work makes a joke about my own artistic practice—beating up a monolith,” said Dean. “You can take this as beating up monumentality, beating up Minimalism . . . beating up the phallus or phallic gesture. None of these and all of these are right.”
Light Falling Like a Broken Chain; Paradise (2021)Shah Garg Foundation
Illuminated landscapes
Mary Weatherford has been exhibiting her art since the late 1980s. Drawing from her Southern California upbringing and interest in art history, her painterly style reimagines the genre of landscape painting.
The light and color of Mary Weatherford
This painting draws inspiration from recent visits to Hawai‘i; sweeping brushstrokes of vivid color evoke lush foliage, exotic flowers, and the dramatic meteorological conditions of the tropical islands.
Joan Snyder's dynamic duality in paint
Like a number of Snyder’s works of the same year, Untitled has a two-part composition, separating the canvas into two distinct halves.
Snyder used the grid as a sectioning device to differentiate contrasting approaches to the application of paint within the same work.
Continue exploring the collection in Making Their Mark II: Luminous Abstraction.
