Abstraction

He was only 22 when he became an expatriate, and found the unspoiled island of Paros in the middle of the Aegean Sea. There he developed an extraordinary approach to painting, fragmenting space as he captured his environment with a 360° view, as if he were painting in the 4th dimension.

Imagine being inspired at a subway station. Here is an artist who creates urban environments as much as he does sculpture and paintings — in the shadow of the Acropolis. He continues to be inspired by that brilliant natural merger of art and science that the Ancient Greeks applied to their art....

Beginning in the mid 1980s, and until his tragic death in 1991, the doors to the pantheon of significant contemporary artists were open to Joseph Amar [1954-2001]. Critically acclaimed, his works were exhibited internationally and were collected by celebrities and major museums. A drunk driver...

Here is a most intriguing chapter in the history of painting in the Southwest. Rane’s large body of paintings form a cosmic codex with stylized female figures and pictographs referring to ancient myth.

Fredericksen was a Norwegian American who during the 1940s studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago under Moholy-Nagy and Archipenko. After a 1947 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago he never actively exhibited his art — with the exception of at least one show at André Emmerich Gallery in New...

Just after World War II, a raucous group of artists in New York City known as the “The Irascibles” wrested away from Paris the title of capitol of the art world. Many art historians have written about those first ten years of Abstract Expressionism and the creative group who have been...

This early AbEx painter suffered three tragedies that resulted in a depression that made him become agoraphobic. Even the entreaties of Leo Castelli failed to draw out the prolific recluse. He wrote that his paintings opened a “back door” to aesthetic secrets held in the universe.

Before he disappeared he was on the perfect path: studying under Josef Albers at Yale; a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1966; internationally, several museums of modern art showed his paintings. But in his spiritual exploration he became reclusive and shunned galleries. In his...

This survivor of the Armenian genocide wound up in a Cairo orphanage in 1927. He rose to fame as one of Egypt’s great modernists, but after moving to Long Island late in life he withdrew into anonymity. Now his compelling story is being told.

Geoffrey Moss has led double lives ever since he earned his MFA in the 1950s at Yale under Josef Albers. Twice he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his political drawings — yet, he has also remained a prolific abstract painter.

After this master glassblower emerged with a new transgendered self the result was a series of powerfully compelling sculptures and installations. Here are expressions of transformation where sex has nothing — and everything — to do with it.

Jenson paints with smoke, utilizing chaos-structured concepts to create his “mythic realms.”

Although O’Keefe’s abstractions are at first glance similar with those of his contemporary, Gerhard Richter, they are in reality quite different. Richter's abstractions are produced by “pulling the paint in emotionless paths over the canvas,” with the purpose of being...

Richard Timperio is a rarity because while he is painter of compelling imagery he is also a pioneering gallerist. In the late 1970s he was at the forefront of a small group of artists who left Manhattan to settle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By the mid 1990s he had created an alternative exhibition...

Starting in 1963, Kokoschka inspired this protegé, Wayne Ensrud, to dig deeper than other young contemporary artists, most of whom had been misled into thinking that a focus of massive energy and emotion was enough to become a great painter. Instead, his epiphany was that painting is a metaphysical...

This master of the painted collage obsessively changes his compositions, as revealed by layers of canvas fragments and a variety of materials. The resulting lyrical expressionist shorescapes are musical in their evocation of particular moods and weather.  

In 2013, ABC’s “Good Morning America” featured the Pinajian Discovery of thousands of paintings rescued from a Dumpster as “the unlikely discovery that has rocked the art world.” Here’s the compelling story of how a master’s life and works were nearly lost forever.

This Figurative Expressionist lived the Bay Area for two decades before settling in Greenwich Village in 1957. He was a regular at the Cedar Bar with his AbEx friends and exhibited at several New York galleries. He even taught at MoMA but soon became a reclusive painter living what he called “a...

A New Image painter whose exuberance of color and brushwork weaves spatial depths, creating an optical energy.

Iraqi Phoenix Qasim Sabti is the founder of a group of Iraqi artists called “The Iraqi Phoenix,” owing not only to their own survival during their country’s war and upheaval but to their creative vision that persisted. Among the most important of Sabti’s artworks are...