As part of Art & Antiques Fair Olympia 2022, QUAD Fine Art is proud to present Postwar to Postmodern: British and European Abstract Art. The exhibition brings together artists from England, Scotland, France, the Czech Republic, Romania, Ukraine and Russia, many of whom forged important connections that brought Europe, devastated and divided post-1945, closer together through the language of abstraction.
The story of this exhibition begins with a gift. Ben Nicholson gifted an abstract drawing to Jeanne Coppel in 1957, a Romanian artist that left her home country and settled in Paris in 1919. This was also the case for Youla Chapoval and Anna Staritsky, Ukrainian artists that were part of the New School of Paris, alongside Pierre Dmitrienko, born in Paris to a Greek father and a Russian mother, and Léon Zack who emigrated from Russia in 1920. The New School of Paris, also often referred to as the Second School of Paris, developed Lyrical Abstraction – a branch of Tachism and the Parisian answer to New York’s Abstract Expressionism, which then travelled from Paris to America and the UK. The English artist John Hoyland is considered one of the key Lyrical Abstractionists. Important cross-continental connections were also made by Sandra Blow as she embraced Italian Arte Povera and by William Gear when he exhibited with Jackson Pollock in New York.
Meanwhile, behind the Iron Curtain, the Czech artist Andrej Belocvetov was fascinated by gestural abstraction. In the 1970s, dedicated to developing a postmodern synthesis of previous styles he is still strongly influenced by the energy of Abstract Expressionism. In the 1950s a new avant-garde emerged in the Soviet Bloc countries. Inspired by Western abstract movements and encouraged by Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’-era lenient cultural policies, artists once again began to experiment with abstraction and depart from the ideological imposition of Socialist Realism. Very quickly, however, the ‘thaw’ ended and a new wave of the avant-garde was pushed into the underground, and Soviet Non-Conformism was born. Eduard Steinberg and Vladimir Nemukhin were part of this movement. One of Nemukhin’s sculptures included in the exhibition is dedicated to Steinberg.
The exhibition intends to showcase the breadth and variety of abstract art in the second half of the 20th century while contextualising the personal connections and political dynamics that shaped it.
Postwar to Postmodern: British and European Abstract Art will run from June 23rd to June 26th as part of Art & Antiques Fair Olympia 2022 (PV June 22nd, 3PM-8PM).
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