Justice in the abstract

Although the link between the three artists in IMMA's group exhibition, 3 x Abstraction, is tenuous, the show is nonetheless a fascinating exploration of this often misunderstood genre. By Billy LeahyAgnes Martin is clearly the star. Of the three artists brought together for the 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing exhibition currently in place at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, her work is by far the most celebrated. Swiss artist Emma Kunz, 20 years Martin's senior, and Hilma af Klint, a further generation back, cannot compete in terms of recognition or fame. So quite what the three share in terms of common ground to warrant this 90-work combined exhibition is initially perplexing.

Granted, the three women lived very ascetic and Spartan lives and none had children or were married. But at the outset, it is hard to move past these minor specifics. Some of the differences between the three, meanwhile, are pronounced. For instance, Martin was one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation, while the work of Kunz and af Klint went unrecognised in their own lifetimes. However, just a single room into the exhibitions, all reservations are virtually erased when an obvious common bond is revealed: the three were far-sighted and pioneering conceptualists, each exploring non-traditional methods in visualising life theory and thought through the aesthetic of geometric abstraction.

For af Klint (1862–1944), Kunz (1892–1963), and Martin (1912–2004) – brought together for this travelling exhibition by the The Drawing Center, New York – the idea of spiritualism also played a fundamental role. Now, let's be honest about this; spiritualism in art is not fashionable – yes, maybe it crops up as a fad or whim from time to time, but rarely does it even register as a trend. In fact, it is mostly ignored and in the sporadic times when it is addressed by art history and critical writing, it is usually dealt a hand of cynicism and suspicion. Perhaps spiritualism is continuing to pay the price for its links with New Age practices and complex yoga body contortions – who knows?

But such wishy-washy ideas are well off the mark when it comes to af Klint, Kunz and Martin. For them spiritualism is merely a single aspect – although quite a major one – in their artistic explorations, which can be interpreted as a search for dimensions beyond the physical and visible. The three are united in their desire to survey and explain the world around them not through solid form, but rather through the notion of fields of energy and planes of forces. The term “supernatural” has been used by critics – most notably Ken Johnson in the New York Times – to describe these forces, but this seems disingenuous as it would suggest the artists are dealing with forces that lie beyond the real world.

This is hardly the case. Sure, af Klint's work was initially informed by regular séance sessions as part of a group known as “The Five”, where “automatic drawings”, as the Surrealists would have labelled them, were produced. But this path merely led af Klint to the aesthetic of abstraction (and five years, it is claimed, before Malevich), something she then used to map and organise her ideas and theories on how life itself connects the visible and the invisible. Abstraction, for af Klint, Kunz, Martin and innumerable others, was just a way of representing that which cannot be represented.

One of the curators, Catherine de Zegher, rationalised this in a recent interview: “In every century, people have tried to explain the world and their passage in the world. In the period when Hilma and Emma were living, they were still into cosmologies. These cosmologies to us may look mystic, but to them were very rational systems. The twentieth century has other cosmologies like structuralism, trying to explain the world through linguistics. With Agnes Martin we're into structuralism.”

Abstraction and perhaps early geometric abstraction are conveniently and unwittingly seen as quite scientific and formal. The role of the spiritual – and more importantly the examination of a spiritual-scientific crossover – is often reduced to a footnote in academic and critical texts on abstraction. However, this seems like an oversight when we consider that Kandinsky (who inked a book entitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art) as well as Mondrian and Klee took theosophical concerns and the idea of the invisible realm as areas of exploration. 3 x Abstraction does much to highlight and underline this relationship.

The exhibition's hope to introduce the artistic contributions of af Klint and Kunz to the public while also re-visiting the work of Martin from a new perspective is, on the whole, successful. But despite their similarities and overlapping fields of exploration, the gap between af Klint and Kunz and the later Martin remains jarring at times. Without doubt, all of the artists have been dealt quite an even hand in terms of the amount and prominence of their work, but the feeling that af Klint and Kunz are hidden behind the luminosity of Martin's stellar oeuvre is hard to ignore.

∏More 3 x Abstraction continues until 26 March. www.imma.ie