What is Abstract Art?

Abstract art refers to works which do not represent reality in realistic visual forms and is a deliberate movement away from reality or the norm.  Instead, abstract compositions use lines, shapes, gestural strokes, colors or symbols to represent ideas. Abstract art has existed as long as human’s have been alive to create it. In fact, geometric abstract symbols have been found in ancient art.

In abstract art, lines, shapes, textures, forms, colors or patterns are used in different ways for both aesthetic and symbolic meanings. Mid-century Abstract artists did not depict reality as it was but rather as they conceived it to be. In some cases, they reduced meaning to simple lines and forms. The earliest forms of abstraction had references that could be identified and contained thoughts, ideas, feelings or imagination from the artist. Abstraction is not limited to painting, but is found in sculpture, printmaking and other forms of media and performance.

The term abstraction encompasses art that is not figurative, not objective and non-representational. That means that it typically contains no identifiable figures, objects or representations outside of the lines, shapes and brushstrokes. Also, abstraction as an artistic movement is wide and broad encompassing many different movements and styles that have developed from the late nineteenth century though till today. These movements and styles often overlapped growing into other movements as the artists who pioneered them shifted, evolved, or edited their practices.

Around the turn of the century, previous artistic abstract movements began to develop into what would eventually be high modernism, which contained little to no symbolic reference, or even outside meaning. As the 20th century loomed, abstraction took two distinct courses. Those that sought to represent pure aesthetic forms and those that sought to use abstract forms to represent emotions or expressions.

 Eventually, modern abstract art gave way to post-modernism, which reintroduced the figure and symbolic references, as artists and philosophers critiqued the emotionless modernism.

Contemporary art embraces abstract art, figurative art, as well as postmodernist ideas, but has moved away from abstract terminology and towards the notion of conceptual art. 

Behind each art is a concept or an idea.

Info from Artlex Art Dictionary