Arts
fromThe Nation
2 days agoRevisiting the Advent of the Abstract
Abstract art's rise is redefined as a practice of self-taught artists rather than solely a product of the avant-garde or historical tradition.
Just shy of 300-feet and improbably painted using an iPad, Hockney's frieze winds its way around the outer perimeter of "A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting," on view at Serpentine North through August 23. These nonchalantly referenced "other thoughts," however, are far from just afterthoughts. They comprise 10 new portraits and explorations of abstraction from 2025, a year that evidently saw Hockney busy hatching new experiments on the pictorial plane.
Splash captures the kind of moment that usually evaporates as quickly as it appears, the instant when paint leaves the brush and lands in an unplanned, perfect pattern. This design takes that impulse and fixes it in textile form, allowing a fleeting artistic gesture to live permanently within a space. The concept begins with the language of abstract art. The surface is scattered with color in unpredictable rhythms, as if created by a single motion of the arm and a quick flick of the wrist.
Carter's elegant, off-kilter forms articulate the alienating experience of life in the thick of political turmoil, drawing on references as disparate as jazz and Russian Constructivism.
To be honest, I keep thinking of them as evolving forms. I try to find new things in them when I look at them. I'm not entirely sure I want to figure them out because I probably won't want to make them if I understand them.