X Museum and Le Consortium Museum in Dijon, France jointly present “Abstraction (Re)Creation – 20 Artists Under 40”, on view from May 25 to October 12, 2025 on the first floor at X Museum Beijing. As the second stop of the international tour of Le Consortium’s “Abstraction (Re)Creation” exhibition in 2024, the exhibition presents 23 abstract paintings by 20 emerging artists under the age of 40, seeking to continue and re-examine the transformation, evolution, and redefinition of abstract art in the current context from the perspective of the multicultural background of the younger generation.
Paris, 1931—after the general trend turned back to representation during the 1920s, some of the historical founders of Abstraction, Theo van Doesburg, Auguste Herbin, Jean Hélion, and Georges Vantongerloo, founded the group “abstraction-création” to counteract the influence of the Surrealist group led by André Breton.
Can abstraction in painting today reveal a new way of approaching art? Is it a more appropriate response to emerging questions, far removed from the subjects, narratives, and other themes of figurative art?
There is no doubt that formalism has prevailed. During the 20th century, Western art utopia has raised non-figuration to the upper level of achievement. Ultimate progress towards simplification of formal vocabulary, criminalization of ornamentation, cancellation of stories and characters to the benefit of pure form, geometry, construction, and so on. But to keep (e)motions, feelings, expressivity, and gestural techniques at work, abstract painting shifted to Tachism, Informalism, and worse…
The art world today has been under huge market pressure and subject to short-term consumption. Is it an observable feeling and/or a fact that young Asian and Black female painters, along with their male counterparts, have jumped into the large non-figurative colored maelstrom, adding their personal touch and contributing to what has suddenly become a “genre”—before potentially falling into the trap of academism around the corner?
Consortium Museum’s history is deeply rooted in historical abstraction and minimalism. It enriched our younger days and fueled utopian dreams of a better world designed by progressive artists and architects—primarily men… Fortunately, in the 1980s, non-Western modernisms, non-binary narratives, and women’s power twisted our certainties. But nothing is completely fixed yet. The exhibition up here confronts these formal strategies, giving rise to a renewed Lyricism is expressed with a sense of both distance and comfort.
20 under 40 may sound like another motto, but 40 years draws an intangible and subjective line between being a young artist and reaching the mid-career status. We focused on youngsters as they may have their unconventional logic and approach to abstraction in art, and especially in painting. Gestural vs. storytelling, expressivity vs. construction, non-representational vs. characters and landscapes, ornamental vs. descriptive, and so on—a diversified generation is taking over the updated challenge to face the long history of abstract painting, and the future is in their young hands, which means that they shouldn’t stick to non-representation for too long. Nevertheless, change is imminent as (re)creative abstraction takes its course.