A show of small, tidy canvases at the punctiliously hip New Museum designates Tomma Abts, the Turner Prize-winning German-English painter, who is forty years old, as the doyenne of a sudden fashion for good old abstract painting in newfangled guises. She’s pretty cool. Her one-of-a-kind (though all of a type) compositions deploy serpentines, polygons, rays, and other generic forms in schemes of astringent color: worried red, disgruntled gray-green, caffeinated peach. Abts is fond of illusionistic tricks that either pointedly don’t work (misfired shadows, zingless zigzags) or, vulgarly, work too well (cheap-shot trompe-l’oeil ridges). The effects feel smart: painting about painting like thinking about thinking, to no end beyond enjoyment. Most of all, Abts is at pains to evade associations with both the visible world and other art. Her success is a negative triumph that appeals to a post-post-painting generation of viewers who, having rediscovered the long-derelict joys of pictorial abstraction, want to dive into them without the nuisance of boning up on art history or theory first. ♦
