CURATED BY: Pepe Karmel & Joachim Pissarro

The Hunter College Art Galleries are pleased to present CONCEPTUAL ABSTRACTION, on view from October 5 – November 10, 2012. The exhibition offers a revealing cross-section through abstract painting of the last two decades. Its starting point is the 1991 exhibition Conceptual Abstraction held at the Sidney Janis Gallery, renowned for its representation of historic abstract artists. The 1991 show brought together a new generation of abstract painters, demonstrating that abstraction remained a vital mode of creation in an art world then dominated by figurative art. This new iteration of CONCEPTUAL ABSTRACTION reunites the twenty painters from the 1991 show, presenting one older and one more recent painting by each artist. What seemed quixotic in 1991 today looks prescient. Rather than trying to revive historic abstraction, the remarkably varied work of the twenty artists in the exhibition expresses the experience of American life at the beginning of the twenty-first century: sometimes brutal, sometimes lyrical, sometimes gleamingly industrial, sometimes delicately handmade. Cumulatively, the exhibition shows how and why abstraction has, once again, become the most exciting current in contemporary art.

FEATURING WORK BY: Ross Bleckner / David Diao / Lydia Dona / Christian Eckart / Stephen Ellis / Peter Halley / Mary Heilmann / Valerie Jaudon / Richard Kalina / Shirley Kaneda / Bill Komoski / Jonathan Lasker / Sherrie Levine / Thomas Nozkowski / David Reed / David Row / Peter Schuyff / Philip Taaffe / Stephen Westfall / John Zinsser

CONCEPTUAL ABSTRACTION is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an introductory essay and catalogue entries by Pepe Karmel. Programming for the exhibition will include a panel discussion of the historic 1991 exhibition at Sidney Janis, and lectures exploring the latest developments in contemporary abstraction.