Alex Greenberger: "After Years of Figurative Painting, Abstraction Roars Back in New York’s Galleries Better Than Ever"

New York is a city that quickly cycles through artistic trends, so it’s been surprising that figurative painting has hung on for the better part of a decade. But now, there are signs that abstraction is roaring back in galleries after a period of relative dormancy. Gestural strokes and off-kilter color fields are becoming the norm, slowly replacing the portraits and surrealist tableaux that have for so long been a fixture of storefront spaces and auction house salesrooms.

What kind of abstraction is this? It’s not quite zombie formalism, the name that critic Walter Robinson gave to the largely rote output of bad-boy painters during the early 2010s. It’s not quite Neo-Neo-Expressionism either, nor is it Neo-Neo-Geo or even neo-anything, because some of it is actually quite old.

Here’s where a New York–specific obsession with painting collides with an international fascination with “rediscoveries,” or artists who have thus far failed to achieve canonization and are now being given a second chance, whether in their late-career period or posthumously. A cynic might say these current shows in New York are a money-motivated attempt to cash in, while an optimist would suggest that dealers’ interest in the under-recognized of art history reflects a welcome global interest in widening the canon. Because commerce and canonization are so deeply intertwined in this city, both viewpoints are probably true.

Whether the current abstraction moment will last will depend on whether dealers can make hay from it. Who knows, given the way the economy is trending. But for now, at least, the abstraction entering New York’s galleries right now does feel fresh, exciting, and worthy of attention. Here are three shows of abstract painting in New York that merit a visit.

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During the 1970s and ’80s, Just Above Midtown, the short-lived New York gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant, fostered the careers of so many artists that curators and dealers are only just now beginning to take stock of them all. (You can thank T. Jean Lax’s effervescent Museum of Modern Art show about the gallery for helping spur on a renewed interest in that space.) At Paula Cooper Gallery, 47 years after first showing at Just Above Midtown, Cynthia Hawkins has officially entered the spotlight once more with a captivating group of new canvases that make the eye go dizzy.

The basis of these new works was Hawkins’s stroll from her apartment on West 83rd Street to a nearby subway station—a route that she then traced and tilted, so that her map was on a 45-degree angle. Presumably in reference to the interlaced streets of the Upper West Side, grids recur across her recent paintings, where they appear to shoot through planes of yellow and red. But Hawkins’s maps quickly come apart amid brushy expanses of color, lemon-hued orbs, and oil stick scrawls. In that way, her paintings resemble those of Julie Mehretu, who uses plans, maps, and diagrams as the basis for her abstractions before allowing their elements to dissemble and recombine.

Hawkins’s new works are part of a series called “Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D,” a title hinting at a desire to depict the fourth dimension via a medium with a rich history of two-dimensional representation. At the end of the day, Hawkins’s paintings don’t necessarily rupture the space-time continuum, but it’s hard to fault such an imaginative painter for trying. My favorite of her new works, Chapter 3: Maps Necessary for a Walk in 4D #1 (2024), features a blue grid with hard edges that transforms itself into a warping, elastic one, a net that can’t contain the chaotic matter all around. Hawkins has run green and black oil stick across her grids, creating what looks either like a spark or a fracture that threatens to upend it all.