Abstraction Today 

Isabel Wünsche (Constructor University Bremen)

Beyond Western Avant-garde Approaches: Abstraction in a Global Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Abstraction distinctly shaped European and American modernism in the twentieth century but also left its mark in Latin America, the Arab world, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Thus, its narrative as a purely western phenomenon requires a closer examination. The largely Eurocentric approach results in a distorted value system in which some works are more authentic than others. Such thinking, with respect to western primacy in artistic creation further enhances notions of primary vs. secondary, influencing vs. influenced, center-periphery and other “western vs. the
others” dichotomies in modernist and avant-garde art.

Artistic production in countries such as China and India, was largely untouched by the paradigms of first one- and then multi-point perspective and the illusion of three-dimensionality that arose in the Renaissance. Instead, an awareness of the formal and expressive possibilities of the media and techniques in use had been a commonplace understanding for Chinese ink painters and Indian miniature painters over many centuries. Thus, the radicalism of the European and American avant-garde was alien to artists in the East. In my lecture, I will discuss the work of nonwestern abstract painters who have developed their approaches in a dialogue between their own cultural traditions and their intensive studies of western art practices.