Abstract art is an expressive form that taps into our collective imagination and emotions. Although some artists use similar techniques, each brings his or her own distinct style into this genre of painting.
Modern abstract artists continue to push the limits of this medium, such as Cy Twombly with his griddy shapes and jagged swaths reminiscent of posters torn from subway station walls or soft scrawls that mimic graffiti tags.
Abstract art captures the beauty and complexity of natural landscapes with large swaths of color, organic shapes, or amorphous figures - whether that means giant swaths of color, organic shapes or even just figures! Artists like David Reed use gestural brushwork to suggest rolling clouds over western landscapes while Gerhard Richter creates paintings that look like photographs with translucent colors and modulated shading reminiscent of photography.
In this article we'll take an in-depth look at some of the Top Current Abstract Painters including their stories behind success and artistic styles of each one!
1. Albert Contreras
Albert Contreras employs mass-produced trowel-like tools when applying his thick paint; these same trowels were employed while resurfacing roads for the city of Santa Monica in the 1960s and again from 1997 until now. He began painting during this time but stopped for 25 years before picking it back up again.
2. Frantisek Kupka
Kupka began his artistic journey as an illustrator and cartoonist before transitioning towards abstraction. Although he never sought to associate himself with any particular movement, his Disks of Newton painting and other curvilinear works are considered early examples of Orphism (art of musical color lyricism). Additionally, he often included elements from Puteaux Group artists in his pieces.
3. Mark Grotjahn
Grotjahn brings conceptual practices into his painterly studio through vibrant palettes, minimal sculpture forms, and graphic design precision. His figurative and abstract works are highly emotive while often challenging hermetic conventions.
Butterfly paintings evoke natural world phenomena while exploring abstraction's fundamental tenets, while his Masks series and Circus series engage figuration. His Untitled painting's symmetrical and monochrome radial bands demonstrate both his exquisite attention to spatial relationships as well as the expressive potential of mark-making, while the placard-sized Prismacolor composition encapsulates this dichotomy between commercialized design and intuitive mark-making.
4. Anselm Kiefer
Kiefer is an internationally acclaimed artist specializing in painting, sculpture and installation art who uses unconventional materials like straw, ash and lead in his pieces to convey symbolic meaning. His inspiration comes from various sources including Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah teachings.
5. Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter is one of the world's most revered artists, known for his multi-decade career spanning more than fifty years and from photorealistic paintings to abstract ones - his style constantly evolves and is one of a kind.
He uses an extended squeegee, which allows him to blend colors precisely, and also uses passages of white for blurred effects.
6. Katharina Grosse
Grosse's expansive site-related paintings expand beyond traditional two-dimensional supports and the picture plane. Her spray works, such as Rockaway (2016, Baltimore Museum of Art), transform an entire seaside building and its environs into immersive artworks.
With her use of an industrial paint sprayer to apply prismatic swaths of color, she blurs the boundaries between painting, architecture and landscape. Monadic shapes move freely from work to work creating an interlinked suite from canvases to cast-metal sculpture. Her book examines various ways in which she expands our definition of painting.
7. Sean Scully
Scully's paintings are poetic, each telling an intimate narrative from his life. He embraced Minimalism during its height while adding expression and color into his art.
He also created relief sculptures such as his Wall of Light series. These compositions combine formal reduction and painterly poesy for emotive visual resonance that also pays homage to European painting traditions. His work can also be found in prints, pastels and watercolors; thus making up a diverse body of his practice which was celebrated here at this exhibition.
8. Bridget Riley
Riley draws on an eclectic range of artistic influences in her geometric patterned paintings. Influenced by artists such as Georges Seurat and Victor Vasarely, Riley creates optical sensations that engage her viewers while also drawing upon Old Master paintings by Giacomo Balla and Stanton MacDonald-Wright as well as contemporary movements such as Futurism, Synchronism Vorticism Orphism that define 20th Century Art. Her diverse influences highlight its complex dialogue.
9. Julie Mehretu
Julie Mehretu has become one of the foremost abstract painters of her generation through a practice that encompasses painting, drawing, installation and video art. Her large-scale paintings feature interweaved layers of lines and shapes which come together in complex compositions to reflect our worldview; she employs geometric abstraction to explore human relationships as well as sociopolitical forces which shape them.
Mehretu has long embraced experimenting with different scales and materials in her artwork, often including architectural features into it. Mogamma, her recent series of four paintings that reflect tensions associated with global uprisings during Arab Spring uprisings and revolutions, was produced over four parts. Mehretu often begins her paintings by projecting source images onto canvas before tracing over them as an understructure over which gestural abstraction is then added.
10. Imi Knoebel
Knoebel is one of the leading contemporary painters, celebrated for his minimalist and abstract compositions that explore form, color, space, and materiality. Knoebel studied under Joseph Beuys at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf; as one of its pioneering artists he helped establish Germany's Minimalist movement following World War II. His purist explorations of modular shapes and bold color relationships are frequently inspired by Russian Suprematist artists Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.
His body of work includes paintings, sculptures, drawings and light projections that explore the idea and boundaries of painting itself. Early works featured pure lines and white images. By 1968 he had become one of the pioneering photographers using photography as an artistic medium by projecting light into empty rooms to document images created from these projections.
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