Between Representation and Abstraction highlights a period of remarkable creativity when ideas of abstraction and the nature and limits of artistic mediums were being contested by artists. Associated with movements like Abstract Expressionism, the Bay Area Figurative School, and Color Field painting, the featured artists continually sought to redefine what painting was and what it could be in the postwar period. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, many artists who had once depicted figures or landscapes considered representation obsolete. Nonetheless, many of them toggled between abstraction and representation, simultaneously creating abstract, semi-abstract, and representational works of art. Together, the variety of techniques and styles of abstraction on view in this installation constitutes one of the most diverse and creative periods in American art.
Image Credit: Willem de Looper, Untitled, ca. 1967, acrylic on canvas, 67 3/4 × 59 1/4 × 1 1/4 in., Oklahoma City Museum of Art, gift of The Frauke and Willem de Looper Foundation for the Arts, 2022.021, © de Looper Foundation, photo © Oklahoma City Museum of Ar
