SEULGI LEE | Histoires d’abstraction. Le cauchemar de Greenberg

Address : Fondation Pernod Ricard 1 cours Paul Ricard 75008 Paris

Group show at Fondation Pernod Ricard with Vidya Gastaldon, Huguette Caland, Adélaïde Fériot, Loie Hollowell, Serge Alain, Nitegeka, Rafaël Rozendaal, N. Dash Mohamed Hamidi, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Seulgi Lee, Ad Minoliti, Stéphanie Saadé, Ulrike Müller

Curator: Marjolaine Lévy

“Elles font l’abstraction [Women Artists in Abstraction], Journeys of Abstraction, Living Abstraction, Ways of Abstraction, Abstraction Singularity, Affinities for Abstraction, Structural Abstraction, Spirituality and Abstraction, Ways of Seeing Abstraction, Epic Abstraction, Abstraction in the Expanded Field, Plein air Abstraction [Open-Air Abstraction], The Shape of Abstraction, Queer Abstraction… Since the start of the year 2020, over a dozen museum exhibitions presented worldwide have taken abstraction as their subject. As diverse as they are, the common denominator of these exhibitions is that they present the latest news in abstraction while attesting to the irreducibility of contemporary forms, but also historical ones, from the abstract art that they present to the broader teleology that American art historian Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) constructed about it. This narrative has apparently dominated thinking about abstraction for decades. In an artistic context that is constantly (and rightly so) calling into question the Western-centric and gendered axioms of the history of art, such exhibitions offer an original and plural reading of abstraction, far from Greenbergian theories. The thirty-eight essays in Art and Culture (1961) written between 1939 and 1960 paved the way for the great modernist fable of abstraction. This was presented as the end of a long “process of self-purification” in art: “It would appear that it is a law of modernism… that any conventions that are non-essential to the viability of a medium are rejected as soon as they are recognized… Painting therefore continues to develop its modernism with the same momentum, since it still has a relatively long way to go before it is reduced to its vital essence.”Pictorial art, in this essentialist logic, must confine itself to its two specific conventions: planarity and the delimitation of planarity, and the refusal of any narrative or external reference. Thanks to abstraction, painting could thus speak only about itself. (…)”

Curator : Marjolaine Lévy