harmony and contrast

In the early 1990’s there was an uptick in exhibitions devoted to abstract painting in New York City galleries. The development was noted as a move away from the neo-expressionist figuration that had dominated the painting scene of the 1980’s. Some of the poststructuralist trappings of 1980’s abstraction persisted, but Peter Halley’s heady interpretations of French theory (“The Crisis in Geometry”)1 had given way to the more sly and relaxed postmodernism of painters like Jonathan Lasker.