The Bold Return of Abstract Art

It’s a challenge to think of a time when painting wasn’t at the top of every collector’s list. Compared to sculpture, installation, and even video art, paintings are relatively easy to live with, work with, or let recede into the background, meaning there will always be a market. 

In my journey over the last few years, I’ve noticed the rise of abstraction: big, bold, and colorful. The first artist to catch my eye, renewing my faith in non-narrative dialogues, is Ilana Savdie. Savdie had a small solo exhibition, titled Radical Contractions, on the first floor of the Whitney Museum in 2023. 

I found myself marveling at the artist’s choices in application and surface textures, staring in the proposed abyss of perfectly graded colors in various forms—geometric, fleshy, and collage-like, all painted. 

The artist uses a calamity of shapes and elements that when visually assembled are confounding and radical. Savdie’s work is like the reimagining of a Renaissance painting after it had been digitally dissected, turned inside-out, upside-down, and placed in a blender filled with paint scavenged from a Trapper Keeper of the 1990s. 

The result is magnificent, otherworldly, and an update to what painters such as Elaine De Kooning and Jackson Pollock were doing in The East End of Long Island in the 1960s. 

As with any and perhaps all abstraction, it’s nearly impossible to look at it without looking for something—an object, a sense of place, a person. When examining Savdie’s paintings up close, there are moments where one might see an outstretched hand, and in between the color fields is a quiet yearning. 

Early abstractionists worked hard to not paint “anything” in particular, but rather, just explore surfaces with paint as an exercise in human motions and the natural gesture of the medium. Physical characteristics came into play as well, those of the body applying the paint, and the surface to which they applied it. 

Whether abstract or representational, there are ways to enter the surface metaphorically, and in some instances, through reflection. 

It can’t be denied that contemporary artists are striking a chord in the abstract playbook with work that feels fresh. Another artist who is making a historic impact on contemporary abstraction is Donna Huanca, who had two shows in New York alone in 2024—one at Faurschou Foundation and the other at Sean Kelly Gallery. 

An artist who makes large-scale abstract paintings with sweeps of color and moments of digital collage, Huanca turns entire galleries into paintings-as-experience where viewers and the occasional performers move through the space, becoming part of the work. 

The canvases themselves are monumental, exploding with rich tones of denim blues, grass greens, golden yellows, bright pinks, and whites. Two additional artists to mention are Jenny Brosinski (whose painted gestures are delicate and squiggly) and Avery Z. Nelson. 

I first encountered Nelson’s paintings at Blade Study, a small gallery in New York’s Chinatown. Their paintings feature smaller brushstrokes and move from areas of intent focus (delicate, wavy lines and clusters of brush marks) to bold sweeping planes of color with geometric shapes, painted edge to edge. 

From pastel pinks and blues, to bold Kelly greens, vibrant fuchsias, and fiery reds, Nelson’s work exposes a tender search for truth in nondescript but intimate, medium-sized canvases, using the language of paint as a way to address body autonomy. 

Will 2025 be the year where we see the return of Zombie formalism? As abstraction competes with representation, the art world has felt over saturated with the latter since 2020. Varying levels of painted recognition have moved in and out of favor, and while some instances of figurative works in the public sphere have improved, many have gotten worse. 

The bold return of abstraction has set a new standard that is in direct competition with the art historical past. However, it remains simultaneously exciting, as the artists making the biggest impact are not cis-male centric.

Artists to watch out for include Amalia Pica, who shows with Herald Street in London; Joanne Mary Robertson, who was just signed to Company Gallery in New York; and veteran painter Catherine Goodman CBE at Hauser & Wirth, who has been making abstract paintings for 40 years.

Here’s to more abstraction in 2025, while also returning to a type of thinking that relies less on being told and more on trusting the act of looking in order to arrive at one’s own conclusion.