“Abstrakt”

Abstract painting, Bridget Riley wrote in 1983, “is still relatively in its infancy. If Mondrian was the Giotto of Abstract Painting, the High Renaissance is still to come.” Riley was one of the participants in the group show “Abstrakt,” on display in two Berlin galleries and curated by Michael Haas, Nicole Hackert, and Bruno Brunnet. The exhibition offered a broad spectrum of abstract works from Europe, the earliest made by Hans Arp in 1932, the most recent by Anselm Reyle, Frank Nitsche, and Eberhard Havekost and dated this year; almost half of the thirty-eight participating artists are German.

What, recently, is the definition of abstract?, one wondered, seeing works of very different artists together. Luckily, the show didn’t present abstraction as a singular style, reducing it to something it may once have been according to certain modernist -isms but isn’t any longer. Instead,

— Jurriaan Benschop