The Brooklyn Rail

Helen Frankenthaler once noted that you can’t “prove” beauty. “It’s there as a fact,” she said on Charlie Rose’s show in 1993. “It gives no specific message other than itself, which in turn should be able to move you into some sort of truth and insight, and something beyond art.” Frankenthaler’s embrace of the righteous ambiguity of beauty permeates a group exhibition currently on view at the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum. The show explores abstraction in glass sculptures, paintings, mixed media projects, and works on paper by various twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists—mostly women—from around the globe. Reflecting on the unknowability of abstract forms, the exhibition invites viewers to approach their own experiences with intention and consciousness.

Jill Ahlberg Yohe, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, unpacks abstraction’s ability to shape meaning by creating moments of visual connection between very different works. Toots Zynsky’s luscious red Carmen Mizimah (2005) glass piece speaks to the bright red color of the nearby Basta Uno Soffio (One Breath is Enough) (2009) by Roberta Silva. Meanwhile, the blues in Petr Hora’s portal-like glass work Hercules (2004), Georgia O’Keeffe’s In the Patio IX (1950), and Patricia Treib’s Shoulder (2020) bounce off each other and two gallery walls in a near-rhyme. The jagged shimmering green glass of Vladimir Prochazka’s Emerald (ca. 2000) playfully dances with the jewel tone color conversation of those works and flirts with the forest green of Udo Zembok’s Colorfields 27a (2007). Elsewhere in the gallery, Howardena Pindell’s pixelated square within a rectangle, Homage to the Square (2022), pays tribute to color theorist Joseph Albers, joining a lively color discourse that shows up in surprising ways throughout Ahlberg Yohe’s curation.

As for Frankenthaler, her Cravat painting (1973) suggests a horizon line and a sense of locality in ways similar to Jin Jeong’s psychedelic Monument Valley (2022) and Steven J. Yazzie’s grand Erupter (2024), a rich, energetic painting that throbs with the beauty of nature.

The Cafesjian holds one of the world’s largest collections of work by the twentieth-century Czech couple Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová. Libenský and Brychtová were trained in Cubism and went on to create pioneering abstract glass works in the second half of the twentieth century—their contributions are highlights here. Blue Concretion (1966), which launched the couple’s careers when it was shown at the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Montreal Exposition, and Space I, Space II, and Space III (1991–92) anchor the exhibition. Humming with an otherworldly energy, the couple’s sculptures reveal light and color through a complex staging of material and structure, light and negative space. Libenský and Brychtová’s works justifiably take pride of place in the Cafesjian’s gallery.

South African artist Thando Ntobela, part of a collective of beadwork artists called Ubuhle, creates dizzying abstract patterns of beads on canvas. Her Puzzles Circles and Patterns (2019) is part of the collective’s efforts to translate the intricate beadwork of traditional ceremonial regalia into contemporary forms. Ntobela’s work makes the case that abstraction was not a European invention; rather, its roots can be found in Indigenous traditions around the globe. Dyani White Hawk’s Self-Reflection (2011) similarly confronts the all-too-common tendency to ignore and erase Native voices when considering the history of modernism. Recalling minimalism and hard-edge painting, White Hawk employs a distinctive moccasin shape as a way to reinsert Native artistic lineage into the canon. The idea that abstraction was solely an invention of European artists still persists today; White Hawk’s work serves as a vital challenge to this narrative by highlighting the fact that abstraction has always existed in many different forms and cultures.

Abstraction & Ourselves positions abstraction as a site for reflection, cultivation of well-being, and exploration of multiple truths. The exhibition presents abstraction as a space where there are no right or wrong answers, inviting visitors to bring their own experiences, emotions, and cultural backgrounds to the work.