Abstraction Today 

Sabine Eckmann (Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis)

Abstraction, Sensation and the Digital

Recently, abstraction has been theorized as the governing principle of our contemporary society. Accordingly, the abstracting effects of an advanced global capitalist society controlled by financial transactions, an everyday life shaped by dematerializing screen cultures, and maybe not least the growing expansions of artificial intelligence intervene into more and more realms of society and contribute to an abstracted and intangible perception of reality, which defines our state of being today. By contrast abstract paintings and sculptures, especially as gestural forms, are frequently interpreted as authentic, universal and subjective. 

Some abstract paintings and sculptures made since the turn of the millennium, use digitally generated images in conjunction with imaginative abstractions to rematerialize art as a means to invoke sensation. While the object itself, often large in scale, insists on permanence and gestalt, artists also turn abstraction against its grain as they reject aspirations of the universal and spiritual. Through the use of digital tools, they employ dematerialized, fleeting images and reproduced feelings, which nevertheless reference a wide field of individual, social and political circumstances.

This paper will examine early forays into the digital such as Michel Majerus’ digital projections, that included his virtual archive of Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes by Willem de Kooning and others. It also explores the ways through which Albert Öhlen’s digital paintings navigate the tensions between virtual shapelessness and factual form. Both artists tested the ways through which these clashes of virtual and material, functional and autonomous, might generate new sensory experiences. Several decades later artists such as Jacqueline Humphries, Firelei Báez, Aria Dean and Julie Mehretu are more forthright: In different ways they use digital mechanisms
and reproduced images of violence to retrieve in their paintings and sculptures empathy, subjectivity and sensation.