Top 36 Abstraction Art Quotes
#1. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.
Richard Diebenkorn
#2. Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.
Paul Gauguin
#3. The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man's best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices.
Ayn Rand
#4. The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.
Piet Mondrian
#5. The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image.
Gilles Deleuze
#6. Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes ... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.
Arshile Gorky
#7. Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable
Derek R. Audette
#8. Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.
Jerry Saltz
#9. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.
Richard Leakey
#10. Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.
Jerry Saltz
#11. A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.
Paul Gauguin
#12. ... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.
Nicholas Gane
#13. What I hope is I'll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction - an art dealer running a museum.
Jeffrey Deitch
#14. It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.
Jerry Saltz
#15. We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.
Max Bill
#16. Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.
Lewis Mumford
#17. Enjoying art is a personal matter. It's made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.
Renzo Piano
#18. I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.
Piet Mondrian
#19. For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening.
Q-Tip
#20. A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master.
Paul Gauguin
#21. 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
#22. Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.
Paul Gauguin
#23. I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art.
Sean Scully
#24. The increased abstraction in mathematics that took place during the early part of this century was paralleled by a similar trend in the arts. In both cases, the increased level of abstraction demands greater effort on the part of anyone who wants to understand the work.
Keith Devlin
#25. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#27. Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
Henri Poincare
#28. All art is an abstraction to some degree.
Henry Moore
#29. No matter how brilliant, amusing or intelligent the creek of abstraction, Dadaism, Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 20th century was, it didn't much affect the historical river of figuration. I predict that in 50 years and in 300 years, figurative art will still be strong and important.
Mark Kostabi
#30. We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art.
Hans Arp
#32. Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.
Kenneth Clark
#33. The key to using abstraction effectively in programming is finding a notion of relevance that is appropriate for both the builder of an abstraction and the potential clients of the abstraction. That is the true art of programming.
John V. Guttag
#34. Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it.
Paul Gauguin
#35. All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth.
Milford Zornes
#36. Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.
David Small
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