“Elles font l’abstraction”, “Journeys of Abstraction”, “Living Abstraction”, “Ways of Abstraction”, “Abstraction Singularity”, “Affinities for Abstraction”, “Structural Abstraction”, “Spirituality and Abstraction”, “Ways of Seeing Abstraction”, “Epic Abstraction”, “Abstraction in the Expanded Field”, “Plein Air Abstraction”, “The Shape of Abstraction”, “Queer Abstraction”… Since the beginning of 2020, over a dozen museum exhibitions presented around the world have made abstraction their subject. As diverse as they may be, the common denominator of these exhibitions is that they show the current state of abstraction, while demonstrating that neither contemporary nor historical forms of abstraction can be reduced to the teleological grand narrative built around it by American art historian Clement Greenberg (1909-1994). This narrative dominated thought on abstraction for decades. In an artistic context that rightly never stops challenging the Western-centric, gendered axioms of art history, exhibitions such as these offer a new, plural interpretation of abstraction that distances itself from Greenberg’s theories. Who was Greenburg, for whom these recent exhibitions—and the one coming soon at the Fondation Pernod Ricard in autumn 2021—could constitute a nightmare?

With the artists :
Laëtitia Badaut-Haussmann, Huguette Caland, Isabelle Cornaro, N Dash, Adélaïde Fériot, Vidya Gastaldon, Mohamed Hamidi, Loie Hollowell, Seulgi Lee, Ad Minoliti, Ulrike Muller, Serge Alain Nitegeka, Rafael Rozendaal, Stéphanie Saadé, Ernesto Sartori, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané...