St. Louis Art Museum Opens New 'Printing Abstraction' Exhibit

ST. LOUIS, MO — The Saint Louis Art Museum is launching an new exhibit to show off the museum's collection of abstract prints, officials said Wednesday. "Printing Abstraction" opens Friday in Galleries 234 and 235 and will run through March 2019.

"For the past 60 years, artists have worked to expand what it means to create images without direct reference to the natural, visible world, focusing on line, color and shape alone," the museum explained in a news release. "To test the possibilities, some gravitated toward the reductive extremes of minimal, monochromatic compositions, while others achieved intense perceptual effects with complex patterns and bold hues. Printmaking, which offers an expansive range of outcomes—from the crisp, mechanical contours of screenprint to aquatint’s atmospheric shifts of tone—have served these artists’ goals with exceptional results."

(For more stories like this, subscribe to Patch for daily newsletters and breaking news alerts. You can also download the free Patch app for iPhone and Android.)

The exhibition will include work from more than 20 artists, including Anni Albers, Marcel Duchamp, Ad Reinhardt, McArthur Binion and James Turrell.

"'Printing Abstraction' considers various strategies, from Op art to hard-edge abstraction and beyond, that have emerged over the past six decades," officials said, adding that recent artists included in the exhibition "speak to the continuing relevance of abstraction today."

The exhibit will be curated by Gretchen Wagner, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for Prints, Drawings and Photographs, and complements another exhibit also on display: "Graphic Revolution: American Prints 1960 to Now," which runs until February.

For more information, visit www.slam.org.

Photo by J. Ryne Danielson/Patch