If you back your way into the Jay DeFeo exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you’ll discover, as I did, a group of five oil paintings in the final gallery. The works are small by today’s standards of monumentality and smaller still by the standards of DeFeo’s most famous work, The Rose. The Rose, occupying its own alcove earlier in the show, is[.....]

All abstract art has one thing at its core:  the human body.  The existence of abstract art is as old as humankind, as are its attempts to either translate or transcend bodily experience without that pesky figuration getting in the way.  This conflict is even present etymologically:  the word ‘abstract’ boils down to meaning something along the lines of ‘drawn away’ – or ‘separated from[.....]