Jonathan Griffin

Sometimes, you only notice something when it’s gone. In the past few months, I have become aware of the absence, in a growing number of artists’ work, of narrative—in particular, narrative about these artists’ biographies or identities. Much of this work is abstract, often purely abstract, and it seems that more and more people, myself included, are lately being drawn to this type of nonobjective and nonliteral work. Historically, abstraction in visual art developed along two parallel avenues: the distortion of things seen in the world (Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso) and the invention of entirely nonobjective forms (Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint). The contemporary work I have been noticing is, by and large, aligned with the latter stream of abstraction. In something of a departure from the dominance of identity-centered figuration in recent years, much contemporary abstraction is being made by artists of color who are resistant to foregrounding their identities through narrative. As mixed-media artist Teresa Baker described her abstract paintings to me, she noted that it is work that “should speak for itself. I shouldn’t have to give words to it.” Her position is echoed by Rema Ghuloum, a painter based in Los Angeles, who told me: “I really want the work to speak for itself.”