About

During the development phase of this show, I read an essay by German art historian Wilhelm Worringer entitled Abstraction and Empathy (1908), translated into English and published in the 1950s. He divided painting into two aesthetic schools: abstraction on one side - attempting to connect with the spiritual, existential and intangible, and on the other, what he defined as empathetic painting (naturalistic), projecting our physical connection to material existence. Worringer’s essay not only elevated abstraction to the ‘respectable’ level of representational artwork, it entrusted a …