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Abstract Art in 2024: Five Standout Exhibits This Year
For BluPrint’s 2024 in Art year-end series, we wanted to highlight the way artists have used abstract art in interesting and provocative ways. This list features a different wave of modern artists who use abstraction as a means of expressing deeply personal narratives and universal truths, liberated from the constraints of representational art.
‘Everything is Blooming Most Recklessly’
Janice Liuson-Young’s productive year ended with a new exhibition at Art Camp Gallery in Makati City. This exhibit, especially in comparison with the two other exhibitions BluPrint covered this year, represents a kind of small evolution in the artist’s works.
The images are more intense, the variations in color and strokes more magnified, the nature imagery more pronounced. The paintings give off this roughness that mimics our relationship with the environment, overlapping with each other to create turmoil in its depiction of nature.
“These works challenge viewers to move beyond surface-level interpretations and embrace the essence of creation—its raw, uncontainable beauty intertwined with imperfection,” the exhibit write-up said. “The gestural abstractions in this exhibition bring ‘truth real,’ presenting the world in its full complexity and revealing the mysteries of existence through art.”
Read more: Art Camp Opens Exhibits on Humanity’s Relationship with Nature
‘Laundry’
For Bea Aspiras’ Laundry, abstract art becomes a cleansing ritual of self-renewal. This Modeka Art exhibit gave viewers a series of images inspired by Aspiras’ travels around the world. She utilized materials from the places she visited as a way of reflecting her perspective at the time. And for the exhibit, she hung the paintings up like clothes left to dry.
The exhibit is interesting because of how small-scale the works are. They reflect places, thoughts, and feelings from the artist wandering through the world. In the end, it becomes a timeless representation of the beauty of our world from the perspective of one artist, finding color and happiness even in the smallness of our existence.
“Each stroke of paint and layer of pigment echoes the rhythm of washing away the past, a gentle reminder that, like freshly laundered linens, we too have the capacity to emerge from the wash revitalized and ready to embark on a new chapter,” the exhibit write-up said.
Read more: Five Noteworthy June Art Exhibits You May Have Missed
‘Serendipity Flukes: The Kutkotan Diaries’
This Mono8 Gallery exhibit from Elmer Nocheseda showed audiences the creative output of a person coping with the struggles of Parkinson’s disease. Nocheseda’s works here give off a sense of hopeful creation during a time of turmoil.
The images can be foreboding, and at times its muted tones can feel haunting to look at. But overall, these doodles or scribbles exist as a stand of individuality and a fight for one’s humanity. It shows that the creation of art links us to our humanity, and strengthens our personhood even through our worst struggles.
“In the midst of this existential turmoil, he finds solace in the realization that even in the darkest moments, there exists a glimmer of divine grace that leads him to the joy of finding his serendipity flukes,” the exhibit write-up said.
‘Blue Plate, Synthetic Savor’
Shown at Galerie Stephanie, Gabby Prado’s work communicates the expressiveness of abstract art—even as it utilizes a limited palette. The exhibit relied a lot on the intuition of the viewer, to connect the dots and see the images within the scribblings.
For this exhibit, the abstract art exuded a frenetic energy that could garner overwhelming emotions from the output. The work felt exciting, especially as Prado paired it with voids of blue to accentuate the color and harmonies within it.
There’s just an interesting dynamic working through these paintings that provokes a reaction, from the colors to the intentionality of its linework and how it all mixes together.
Read more: ‘Blue Plate, Synthetic Savor’ Paints with Abstract Voids of Blue
‘The Heart of Every Mountain is Ocean’
This final exhibit finds that abstract art need not be abstract in its meaning; in fact, it creates an avenue that discusses ideas that go beyond the typical Western traditions taught in art classrooms in the country.
The showcase, another from Mono8 Gallery, was a modernization of Kalinga textile art from artist Irene Bawer-Bimuyag. Her work here flowed together like the waves of the ocean, utilizing traditional weaving techniques from this indigenous tribe to create artwork that represents their interests.
Every woven artwork here looks beautiful, with eye-popping colors and tactile, three-dimensional textures that present small images of the tribe at work. There’s a beauty in the works here, communicating to viewers in a language of familiar elements rooted in the history of the tribe. Overall, a great and involving experience to reckon with.
Read more: ‘The Heart of Every Mountain is Ocean’: Turning Kalinga Textile into Art
Abstract Art and Emotionality
Whether to showcase culture or one’s personal perspective and experiences, abstract art broadens the artist’s ability to represent something unrepresentable in typical art. Through its use, the craft is reflective of the emotions swirling around life, untethered to the physical while still able to resonate on deeply human levels.
Abstraction will always have a place in contemporary art, to bring to life something beyond our own reality.
Photos by Elle Yap.
Related reading: The Drawing Room Presents 3 Japanese Artists in a Group Exhibition
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