CHARLES G. SHAW

Definitions of the abstract are loose. What is an abstraction to one person is figurative reality to another, and the movement of American Abstraction is loosely defined with each practitioner understanding their role and subject matter differently. For Shaw, his ‘Plastic Polygons', as he called them, were not abstractions of the New York architecture but truthful depictions of concrete objects, and he coined the movement ‘concretionism’. The works are pioneering, and helped lay the foundations for so many artists that followed, but he was painting in a time when abstract art of any sense was not fully accepted by the critical vanguard or the commercial collectors. Soft palette and sharp lines create an atmosphere, but the work is mostly unemotional or expressive - instead, they are an attempt to depict the beauty of a rigorous system through form and color. For years Shaw painted in the series, and with each show and painting he moved the dial slowly to create an environment of acceptance to more radical forms.

REMEDIOS VARO

Remedios Varo spend most of the 1930s on the run. First from her native Spain where her outspoken political activism and relationship with a known anarchist artist made her a target for Franco in the rising Spanish Civil War. And then from Nazism in her adopted Paris for much the same reasons. A decade was spent moving from town to town in Western Europe, living a bohemian life of coffee shops, art and destitution with the avant-garde intellectuals of the day. While she was painting throughout, and well regarded for her surrealist works of esoteric magic, it was not until 1941 when she settled in Mexico City that she reached artistic maturity. The work made there is complex and beautiful, as much inspired by the folk practices of Mexico as the European Surrealists and intellectuals she had spent the previous decade with. There are nods to occult magic, and heady psychoanalytical dives into the subconscious which combine to make her work somewhat unclassifiable. It was while in Mexico that she became friends with Leonora Carrington and Kati Horna and, together, they became known as ‘The Three Witches of Surrealism’. Yet the name has always been unjust, as together they elevated surrealist ideas into something more tender and complex, removing the masculine edge parts of the movement had to create a style that feels, even today, singular.

ANNIBALE CARRACCI

Lauded and lusted after by great collectors over millennia, it stayed in the single commissioning family for most of its life, rejecting offers from the King of England for its possession before finding its permanent home in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1836. Annibale Carracci’s monumental work was an object of desire not simply for its aesthetic beauty or holy reverence but for its position as the synthesis of an era. Carracci is regarded as one of the founders of Baroque, returning to the classical monumentality of early Renaissance masters but adding in a vivid and dynamic lifeblood. Here, he took the styles of the day from across northern and southern Italy and united them into something that felt remarkably new. Classical sculpture, the cartoons of Rafael and the bright Roman frescoes of the 1400s meet in a work that rejected the more naturalistic vogues that Caravaggio was pioneering and brought back a sense of dramatics to religious art that would sustain for the hundreds of years after his passing.