Rosenberg & Co. is pleased to present The shape of things: American abstract art. The shape of things brings together nine artists working in the United States across the middle decades of the twentieth century, each represented here by two works.

What unites them is a shared commitment to the formal — to color as structure, shape as language, and composition as a kind of thinking. Across painting, collage, and construction, these artists found that geometry could carry feeling, and that abstraction was not a retreat from the world but a new way of seeing it.

As waves of modernism fanned outward from Europe in the twentieth century, artists working in the United States became drawn to abstraction as a new means of expression. Although initially dismissed by critics as derivative of the European avant-garde, American abstract artists advocated for the inclusion of non-figurative art within the American tradition, developing a visual language that was uniquely their own. The shape of things explores the endless possibilities of form that American artists adopted, analyzed, and reconstructed in the ensuing decades, as abstraction traced a trajectory from peripheral to central and back again.