Creating Abstraction, review: thrillingly experimental art that appeals to all the senses

The works on display at Pace Gallery’s new show don’t tell stories, nor do they represent people, objects or places. Yet they exude a palpable energy and a thrilling aura of experiment. In the mid-20th century, artists across the globe were rejecting realist principles and exploring the possibilities of shape, colour and material, not as a means to a pictorial end, but for their own sakes. Creating Abstraction displays works by seven international female artists, born between 1899 and 1972, who saw the potential in abstraction to produce radical and original works of art.

These artists worked across multiple media, often using unconventional materials and experimental techniques to push the boundaries of their chosen forms. Italian pioneer Carla Accardi developed a signature use of sicofoil, a transparent plastic not previously considered the stuff of art. Born in Yorkshire but a cornerstone of the St Ives scene, Barbara Hepworth was the first to pierce her sculptures, filling the curved forms of her bronzes with empty space. Russian-born American Louise Nevelson collected scrap furniture from the streets of New York, and used its tattered odds and ends to create imposing structures, spray-painted monochrome and embedded with intriguing pockets of smaller-scale forms: collage in three dimensions.

Arranged across three rooms, these works require and reward close attention. The labour of their making is often visible, from the nails holding together Nevelson’s Transparent Sculpture IV (1967-68) to the natural variations in colour on Yto Barrada’s beautiful textiles, geometric grids made from silk dyed with pigments from her garden in Tangier.

The materials themselves are allowed to shine: I admired the sombre patterns on the alabaster of Hepworth’s Two Forms (1934), the first work she made after the birth of triplets, and the grainy surface of Singapore-born Kim Lim’s Slate Relief (1994), the jagged incisions on one edge calling out across the gallery to the protruding slats of Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair’s snail-like Spiral Rhythm (1985-87).

The two-dimensional works hung on the walls are – mostly – paintings, though all are not what they seem: Accardi’s Segni Gridi covers a wooden window frame with sicofoil, over which she has painted exuberant black raindrops, while Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes’s delicate anni #26 I (2020) is a deceptively strong web of thin brass recalling the grid forms of US textile artist Anni Albers. It overlooks a central stage where curators have assembled a selection of small, perfectly formed sculptures by Hepworth and Choucair.

There’s a real dynamism to these pieces: Hepworth’s Stringed Figure (Curlew) (1956) evokes waves crashing against the cliffs of her adoptive Cornish town, while several of Choucair’s works are split into two parts separated by a couple of inches, the space between them designed to recall the line-breaks which divide the stanzas of a poem.

Some of the resonances between disparate works are testament to the artists’ wide travels and engagement with their surroundings, from the Mayan ruins Nevelson saw in Mexico, to Lim’s visits to ancient monuments in the Middle East, to the European modernism Choucair encountered while studying in Paris in the late 1940s. Yet what binds these artists above all is the way each has made abstraction afresh, finding their own distinctive voices as they experimented across media with an infectious spirit of curiosity. Several of these works take their titles from music, movement and poetry: this is art that appeals to all the senses, that interrogates and transforms what it means to be modern.

Until March 12. Tickets: 020 3206 7600; pacegallery.com