Sensory Poetics: Collecting Abstraction

Sensory Poetics: Collecting Abstraction will bring together highlights from the Guggenheim Museum’s growing collection of contemporary art. Acquired over the past ten years, and shown at the museum for the first time, this selection of artworks reflects developments in painting, sculpture, and video from the 1960s to today that manifest in a turn towards gesture as a response to the constraint of Minimalism.​​

Several artists featured in this exhibition find creative inspiration in organic processes and natural phenomena; others pursue paths of liberation through the abstraction of the corporeal form or engage with other disciplines, including jazz music, classical architecture, and poetry. Evident in all of these works is an appeal to the human hand, whether through the tactility of the materials or the gestural marks that comprise the compositions.

This presentation will cover a cross-section of diverse aesthetic approaches taken by artists originating from Europe and the Americas and will reaffirm the Guggenheim’s commitment to expanding the story of abstraction that is at the core of its history. On view will be works by Carlito Carvalhosa, Jessica Dickinson, Jorge Eielson, Sonia Gomes, Virginia Jaramillo, Caroline Kent, Senga Nengudi, Zilia Sánchez, Vivian Suter, and Stanley Whitney.

Credit: Overview from museum website