Contemporary Non-objective Art

Abstract

My project, Contemporary Non-objective Art, is a practice-led investigation into the dominant narratives surrounding non-objective or abstract art, and how they can be revisited and reimagined. This project aims to challenge typical and chronological ideologies that have defined non-objective art and to demonstrate a new outlook. Particularly by demonstrating how theatricality in art can be embraced, filling the work with both irony and symbolic weight. Throughout this project I use the term “non-objective art” as a way of describing and focusing on the aesthetic and technical elements of my work and practice. I want to stress that this is a visual language of modernist painting and sculpture as a form of practice— even when it is carrying the historical values of its time. I argue that the modernist narrative has changed, and that this is an important element of contemporary reductive practices—in particular, geometric abstraction. The social and cultural narrative of modernity is now self-consciously inflected with the self-critique that led to postmodernity. This has created new contexts and interests in art practice that are no longer aligned with the reductive idealism of early 20th century non-objective or “abstract” art.1 At a time when artists are struggling to maintain sense of non-objective art, I hope to use this paper and my artwork to add strangeness and irony as a way to find new interest and vitality in non-objective art. My research illustrates a resistance to the principals and ideas of the early 20th century through the 21st century’s visual language of unconventionality.