In everyday language abstraction refers to the process by which one draws a generalised notion or formula from the particularities of real experience. Abstraction in this sense is the result of an intellectual effort that everyone makes in order to cope with everyday experience. For instance if I say ‘tree’ – you have only a word, but it will stand for trees of all sorts, for oaks, poplars, willows, firs, names which in turn are minor abstractions of the infinite variety of real trees. But in visual art this is not the meaning of abstraction although it has often been confused with it.
The rise of Abstract art, especially in the first half of the twentieth century was accompanied by abstracted images from nature, schematic figures and objects, all of which bear witness to the uncertainty of the terrain explored and to the inevitable bewilderment that surrounded the emergence of this new form of art. [Paul] Klee was the first artist to point out that for the painter the meaning of abstraction lay in the opposite direction to the intellectual effort of abstracting: it is not an end but the beginning. Every painter starts with elements – lines, colours, forms – which are essentially abstract in relation to the pictorial experience that can be created with them.
Bridget Riley in an essay ‘Making Visible’ for the catalog published by the Hayward gallery to accompany the exhibition ‘Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation’ at the Hayward in 2002
