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The Alessandro Berni gallery, in the Perugia Alchimia Open Space for the Art, is pleased to announce Abstract Now!, a new edition of the group exhibition curated by Stefania Carrozzini, hosted by Camden Image Gallery in London in September 2019 and featuring eight artists from: France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, United States.

This exhibition displays the work of contemporary artists engaged in abstraction. The works were chosen for their visual impact and the strong dialogue they establish between the past and today’s abstractionist.

In this show artists incorporated spontaneity and analysis, so their entire creative process produces surprises and discovery. Abstract art now lives in the art world in many forms. The experimentation with new media opens new frontiers to the abstract art language building up multiple meanings.

We know that Abstract art can also be made with many materials and on many surfaces. It can be used in concert with representational art or completely abstract. Artists creating it often focus on other visual qualities like color, form, texture, matter and space. Abstraction allows us to see with our mind what we cannot see physically with our eyes.

Defining abstract art is difficult. In its most extreme form – “pure abstraction”, as Mondrian called it – it is totally lacking of reference to the natural, material world. But the basic understanding of abstraction as the antithesis of the familiar and the real is inadequate, and not especially helpful if we are to understand our connection to the original movement.

Chaos in abstract art is only apparent: in reality the laws of composition assimilate a picture to a building: all its parts are connected to each other by laws of physics. There is a great sense of freedom but the price is the discipline towards very precise rules. Having said this, then it is poetry that ties everything together and gives meaning to the work.

Abstraction is “an art of individuals”, to borrow Wyndham Lewis’s phrase. Liberated from the restrictions of “copying” the visible world, abstract form provided the artist with a new, language with which to communicate. It also allowed a higher freedom of interpretation for the viewer. And now there is a potential for reading abstract art in a different way, for seeing it in a new light.

The most obvious reason for our celebration is the explosive production of abstract paintings being made today. And perhaps the golden age of abstraction is right now. This style is more exciting than ever; proof that what was begun in the past, is far from being over in our present.