ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Mark Rothko's No. 5/No. 22

Jackson Pollock. Mark Rothko. Robert Motherwell. Joan Mitchell. Arshile Gorky. Lee Krasner. Willem de Kooning. These are just a few of the legendary 20th-century artists whose artwork is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario.  The AGO exhibit Abstract Expressionist New York is an exhibition drawn from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, on view until September 4, 2011, features 100 key works by artists whose radical work changed the course of art history and catapulted New York City to the centre of the international art world.

Abstract Expressionist New York is drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection of works by the pioneers of abstract expressionism, from its beginnings in the 1940s through its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibition features works across a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawings, and photographs, including 12 era-defining works by Pollock, and multiple works by Rothko, Motherwell, de Kooning, Gorky, Barnett Newman, Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, David Smith, and others.

If you’re interested in seeing how these masterworks use negative space, compositional tension, and emotional intensity, or you’d like to spend a while appreciating the works of Paul Caponigro and Robert Frank, also part of the exhibit, take some time out of the last few weeks of summer and visit the Art Gallery of Ontario.