Artists driven to abstraction

This show, at the new galleries in Imma, brings together works by three artists with no direct connection to one other, writes Aidan Dunne.

Reviewed:

3 X Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing, Irish Museum of Modern Art until March 26 (01-6129900)

Organised by New York's Drawing Centre, it really does bring their work together, intermingling it rather than allowing each a distinct space. The artists are Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin. All three employ geometric abstraction, ambitiously, but, while there are sympathies and correspondences between them, sometimes the connections implied by the hanging are superficial, based on little more than visual resemblance.

Not that the exhibition is at all superficial in itself, or uninteresting. It's just that I kept getting the feeling that there was a really beautiful Agnes Martin show in there somewhere, trying to get out. Equally, af Klint is a fascinating artist who, following what might be described as an idiosyncratic route, came up with extraordinary work, and a show devoted to her would be fascinating. Despite her real virtues, Kunz doesn't come across so well. She is by comparison heavy-handed and at times even plodding in her mandala-like compositions, startling as they are in the context of her background.

The rationale for the show, as framed by one of its curators, Catherine de Zegher, is that while the artists were separated by time and geography, all of them approached geometric abstraction not as a kind of pictorial formalism, "but as a means of structuring philosophical, linguistic, scientific, and transcendental ideas".

For each, abstraction amounted to a rich language equal to the complexity of the world. They were all Protestants, she points out, and in many respects exemplified the Protestant work ethic, living industrious though solitary, introspective lives. In different ways they each display an underlying concern with the restorative, therapeutic potential of art.

Af Klint (1862-1944) was Swedish and an "artist, healer and spiritual seeker," who, in a sense, led a secret, double life. While she painted and sold landscapes, and dealt in maps (a family business), she was interested in spiritualism and became involved with the Theosophical Society. She built up a vast cache of paintings, drawings and writings all of which, she specified, should be kept secret for 20 years after her death. Af Klint absorbed many of the ideas of her time, from radical scientific and aesthetic theories to several varieties of mysticism. Eventually, she turned to Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy. She developed her own metaphysical system, encompassing a judiciously comparative view of religion, and hinging on a universal aspiration for oneness. All religions are a way of working toward God, she argued, but God was for her "a power, not a creature but an eternity . . . " Abstraction was a way of exploring, visualising and expressing these ideas.

Because it involves the orderly use of geometric motifs and methodical frames of reference, there is a logical, systematic air to af Klint's work. The show features one amazing sequence of images, each of which offers a schematic representation of a religion, centred on a circle. Here, as elsewhere, while on the face of it a coherent, rigorous symbolism is at work, her methodology is personal and intuitive. Inevitably, perhaps, given that it's art, not science. But her use of line, form, colour and motif is inspired and her images are remarkably approachable and engaging.

Emma Kunz (1892-1963) was Swiss. She too was a healer, artist and writer and she too exemplified the dual fascination with science and mysticism typical of her time. Although her drawings are based on geometric patterns and forms delineated against the framework of a grid (not unlike the compositions engendered by a once-popular drawing toy called something like Spirograph), she made them in a mediumistic state. That is to say, she felt they emerged by channelling some agency external to herself, and that they were at least partly functional. For her, they were an aspect of her activity as a healer and useful in allowing her to transform harmful into benign energies. No matter where one stands on the question of faith healing, they are extraordinary, inventive visual documents.

Agnes Martin, sadly, died late in 2004. Born in Canada in 1912, she became a US citizen in 1950. She is, in conventional terms, by far the best known of the three artists, though she too had a questing sensibility, most famously expressed not through her work but in her mid-life break from it. In 1967, well established, she stopped paintings and drawing and quit New York to travel and think. When, several years later, having resettled in New Mexico, she turned to paintings again, there was a significant shift in what she was doing, though in spirit it was very much in keeping with most of the wonderful drawings on view here.

Echoing af Klint and Kunz, she was influenced by the mystical leanings of her time, which happened to be Eastern. The curatorial slant on the show tends to view all the work - flatteringly - in relation to a narrow, high church definition of Modernism. But the historical context is surely much more complex. In the ordering principle underlying af Klint's work, for example, one can detect evidence of the obsessive, taxonomic mindset of the Victorian era. There is an absolute, visionary conviction to both her and Kunz's approaches that is rooted in their time. In Martin, on the other hand, there is a palpable sense of doubt.

Although everything she does is based on a strict geometric order, on procedures that are inflexible and in a way obsessive, she also relishes the fallibility of the human touch. To paraphrase Kant: no one has ever made anything straight out of the crooked timber of humanity. It is something that comes across well when you encounter her work in the flesh. Reproductions can iron out the nuances. But in reality the faltering sense of a glimpse, a possibility, comes through, rather than any kind of certainty. Although her work is abstract in the most rigorous sense of the term, it is rooted, as well, and without inconsistency, in her relationship to nature. Her drawings make the exhibition unmissable.