At the beginning of the 20th century, artists developed a new visual language: it was no longer meant to depict the visible world, but rather to be radically modern and universally understandable. Science, technology, and progress—as well as the search for the spiritual and emotional—became the driving forces behind an art form reduced entirely to lines, colors, and shapes. To this day, abstraction continues to fascinate us in its many forms.

At the heart of this exhibition, featuring some 60 works, are three significant new acquisitions by Carmen Herrera, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mark Rothko. Surrounded by other paintings and sculptures from the museum’s own collection, they illustrate three distinct forms of abstraction—the departure from the object, geometric construction, and color-field painting. With their transnational biographies, these artists also demonstrate that abstraction has always been—and still is—a global movement.