Varieties of Abstraction

Halsey Rodman's "It's Not Getting Bigger You're Getting Closer" at Laurel Gitlen.

Happy birthday, abstract painting! One of the prides and joys of Western modernism is in the vicinity of its first centennial. It’s hard to be much more exact, since its invention was a scattered effort extending over years if not decades. Fans of Frantisek Kupka should have celebrated last year; Kandinsky’s crowd can uncork the Champagne in 2012. Devotees of Mondrian or Malevich will have to wait a year or two longer.

Of course one can make too much of this anniversary. Beyond the narrow precincts of Western painting and sculpture, abstraction has been a free radical in visual culture for a lot longer than a century, a vital component in ceramics and textiles worldwide, for example, since time immemorial, or in Chinese painting for most of a millennium. Still, within a global history of abstraction, the Western variety has its own substantial chapter, one that is still being written.

Since its inception, abstract painting in the West has given as good as it has gotten. It has spawned styles, schools and opposing camps, not to mention volumes of criticism. It has repeatedly cross-fertilized with representational painting; absorbed found materials and aspects of popular culture; adopted the strategies of postmodern irony and appropriation.

In addition the principles of abstraction have spread to photography and sculpture and beyond — even to the mind-set behind Conceptual Art, with its penchant for systems, categories and repetition that isolate and reorganize, and thereby abstract, aspects of reality. It is worth remembering, when considering the ever-expanding definition of abstract art, that the term refers to the act of abstracting from reality. For whatever reason, such art — in paint and other mediums — is unusually visible in Manhattan galleries this summer. The shows in question don’t always set out to focus on abstraction per se, but that doesn’t stop them from providing a lively account of some of its movements.

Miguel Abreu Gallery

The camera — as a tool for creating not so much abstraction but the aura of it — is at the center of “False/Divide: representations of abstraction in a few photographic works,” a slightly esoteric but completely intriguing show at Miguel Abreu (36 Orchard Street, Lower East Side). Basically, the works here use different elements of photography to make the world less legible, forcing us to sort through what we’re seeing, what we think we’re seeing, and what we’re thinking.

Liz Deschene’s silver-toned photogram is blank, a ghostly modernist monochrome whose main visual incident, in its lower left corner, is a shadow on or crease in the paper; you can’t tell which. Eileen Quinlan’s silver gelatin print, an angular abstract, seemingly made with light, shadow and perhaps a shard of mirror, is only slightly more substantial. And Zoe Leonard presents two photographs of what appear to be the same tangled bush with berries — one large and in color, the other smaller and black and white — to mind-bending effect. Puzzling out whether they are from the same negative dissolves the images into masses of details.

Sam Lewitt achieves a similar mystery by taking the letters and forms from hot-type printing, photographing them individually, then enlarging and combining the images on a computer. The final assemblagelike composition of perpendicular elements of wood and metal is completely ambiguous in terms of its actual size, weight, function, orientation and vintage, although it resembles one of Irving Penn’s elegant, white-ground images.