Abstraction as Sensual Experience

November 6, 2025 - January 17, 2026

Opening: November 6, 2025, 7 p.m.

More details coming soon!

Although works created using abstract forms can often be linked to intellectual and spiritual content, they can also provide fundamentally sensual experience.

Paintings can trigger involuntary movements, evoking the dynamics of motions and gestures, and they may even encourage the repetition of physical positions. Objects that resonate with the slightest sign of proximity can make the viewer aware of her physical presence, thus enhancing her perception of space. Visual rhythms created by the repetition of shapes and colors can also convey movement and evoke musical associations. Other works encourage touch or provoke the senses of taste and smell. The viewer can thus gain sensory experiences and individual impressions, and their self-reflective presence can be realized.

This "experience-based" dignity, this sensual form of reception, was proposed to viewers by American art historian Gene Swenson in the 1960s. Instead of using institutionalized, academic, logical-critical language, he recommended Marcell Duchamp's witty, sensual (almost seductive) and multi-layered mode of speech for interpreting art. Instead of canonized forms, therefore, the realization of a direct connection between the work and the recipient, resulting from the functioning of the senses.  

Recognizing the independence of the viewer in shaping a cultural process in the space of the exhibition—and thus in the public sphere—is not only personal, as it can contribute to shared knowledge by shaping interpretation. However, if abstract painting appears in public as a representation of institutional-power sphere, then the issues raised in relation to this topic indicate a broader horizon. Just as humor—an important aspect of interpreting many of the exhibited works—can further shape and build on all of this.