110 Abstraction Quotes
Following is our list of abstraction quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about abstract painting.
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Famous Abstraction Quotes
Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. — Josef Albers
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. — Edsger Dijkstra
Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity. — Zaha Hadid
Abstraction trades an increase in real complexity for a decrease in perceived complexity. That isn't always a win. — John Carmack
Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition. — David Lynch
In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something. — Andreas Gursky
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. — Pablo Picasso
Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment. — Diego Rivera
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty. — Piet Mondrian
Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space. — Joan Mitchell
The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements. — Jan Tschichold
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. — Jackson Pollock
The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it. — Friedrich Nietzsche
abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality. — Piet Mondrian
Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another. — Claude Levi-Strauss
Short Abstraction Quotes
- Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. — Jackson Pollock
- There is no must in art because art is free. — Wassily Kandinsky
- A perfume is more than an extract it is a presence in abstraction. A perfume, for me, is a mystique. — Giorgio Armani
- It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all. — Gerard Way
- I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. — Gustave Moreau
- Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form. — Anton Ehrenzweig
- The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. — Lucian Freud
- Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction, and certainly not in isolation. — Jiddu Krishnamurti
- Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete. — Jean-Paul Sartre
- Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class. — Vladimir Lenin
Abstract Art Quotes
The drawings don't start with 'a beautiful mark'. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion. — William Kentridge
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. — Jackson Pollock
Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. — Wassily Kandinsky
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. — Oliver Sacks
The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. — Jackson Pollock
Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion. — Alexander Calder
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. — Kenneth Tynan
We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface. — Theo van Doesburg
The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all. — Andy Warhol
Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning). — Jerry Saltz
Abstract Painting Quotes
I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece.. it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape. — Jenny Saville
I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time. — Henry Flynt
I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall. — Frank Stella
I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea. — Willem de Kooning
The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on! — LeRoy Neiman
I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. — Jackson Pollock
I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman. — Jean-Michel Basquiat
What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements. — Marc Chagall
As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism. — Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye. — Clement Greenberg
Abstract Expressionism Quotes
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism. — Don Delillo
But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden
The painting has a life of its own — Jackson Pollock
The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. — Jackson Pollock
There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of Abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction. — Robert Rauschenberg
When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. — Jackson Pollock
When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own. — Jackson Pollock
I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. — Jackson Pollock
Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty. — Robert Motherwell
Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks. — Joni Mitchell
Abstract Thinking Quotes
Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself. — Brian D. McLaren
I think most people, when they think about the Black Panther Party, they think in very abstract, caricatured terms. They think about black fists in the air, but they don't think about the actual people, and the families, and the relationships. — Kerry Washington
The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible. — Saul Bass
Art - when it is really doing what it should do - teaches abstract thinking; it teaches teamwork; it teaches people to actually think about things that they cannot see. — Bill T. Jones
When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality. — Julie Taymor
But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions. — Fyodor Dostoevsky
It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression. — Agnes Martin
I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much. — Newt Gingrich
Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves. — Dag Hammarskjold
We often judge cities by great public buildings. But we admire great cities because people live there in a beautiful way. You have to think about how each person will live there; you can't just think about abstract ideas. — Daniel Libeskind
People Writing About Abstraction
More Abstraction Quotes
We feel the beauty of nature because we are part of nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains. Although we may deal with particulars, we return finally to the whole pattern woven out of these. — Ernest Everett Just
God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints. — Avicenna
True Christianity is not merely believing a certain set of dry abstract propositions: it is to live in daily personal communication with an actual living person - Jesus Christ. — J. C. Ryle
I know the stars are my home. I learned about them, needed them for survival in terms of navigation. I know where I am when I look up at the sky. I know where I am when I look up at the Moon; it's not just some abstract romantic idea, it's something very real to me. See, I've expanded my home. — Gene Cernan
Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind. — Ayn Rand
Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite side of the prefrontal cortex, the right area that plays a role in creative thought, emotions, formation of mental abstractions, and negative emotions. — James Nestor
Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage. — Auguste Comte
Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. — Robert M. Sapolsky
Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful. — David Lynch
Where human eyes have never seen, where human beings have never been, I build a world of abstract dreams, and I wait for you. — Sun Ra
Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. — Gilles Deleuze
We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually. — Rahm Emanuel
This could be a cause of despair for mathematicians who view mathematics as this abstract, perfect, fully self-contained thing. But Chaitin makes the argument that, actually, it opens up for creativity in mathematics. It means that even in mathematics you are always one step away from falsifying something and then finding a better explanation for it. — Naval Ravikant
New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation. — Roland Barthes
In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. I chose to investigate blackjack. As a result, chance offered me a new set of unexpected opportunities. — Edward O. Thorp
In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. — Edward O. Thorp
Music is an essential part of everything we do. Like puppetry, music has an abstract quality which speaks to a worldwide audience in a wonderful way that nourishes the soul. — Jim Henson
Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity. — William Manchester
He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. — Arthur Conan Doyle
There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension, seen from which the previous ones are mere abstractions. Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realization you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Every mathematical theory is held inside a physical substrate of a brain or a computer. You’re always bound by the laws of physics, and these pure, abstract domains may have no mappings to reality. — Naval Ravikant
In Conclusion
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