gestural abstraction

Hockney’s lively linear tangle of limbs and branches — that look oddly like a diagram of a brain — pushes the painting legacy forward, encapsulating gestural abstraction from Jackson Pollock in the 1940s to Brice Marden in the 1980s.

He hoped to give gestural abstraction a material heft that would correspond to a viewer’s physical presence.

“The group’s iconic style can be seen as a hybridization of Eastern-Asian calligraphic traditions and the tendencies toward gestural abstraction that were evolving across international modern painting,” Smith said.

Laura Smith, the exhibition’s lead curator, said in an interview that she had spent more than a year researching women painters working in gestural abstraction between 1940 and 1970, and was surprised at how many she discovered, from all over the world.

Upstairs in the resident artist’s gallery, Stephanie Lane demonstrates multiple styles of gestural abstraction.