Abstract Resistance

True to its title, the exhibition Abstract Resistance considers the metaphor of "resistance" as a complex political and compositional force defining art of the past half-century. Starting with Michel Foucault's assertion that "where there is power, there is resistance," it explores art made since World War II that has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Rather than creating an explicit art of social protest, artists have responded to violence and upheaval with a type of art that rejects comforting moral certainties. Such art is resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.