Abstract painting can feel intimidating. Without a recognizable subject, many viewers assume there is a hidden meaning they are failing to decode. In truth, abstraction asks for something simpler: that you feel before you analyze.
A Language Without Words
Abstraction communicates the way music does — directly, through rhythm, color, and gesture, without translating itself into language first. A great abstract work can carry grief, energy, or calm without ever naming them. This is not a lack of content; it is a different delivery system for content. Where a figurative painting gives you a subject to identify, an abstract painting gives you a set of relationships — warm against cool, thin glaze against built-up impasto, a fast gestural mark against a slow, considered field — and asks your eye to resolve them into feeling.
That tradition runs from the Abstract Expressionists' emphasis on gesture and scale to the Color Field painters' interest in saturation and atmosphere. Contemporary abstraction inherits both threads, and most working artists lean toward one or blend them: gesture-driven mark-making versus quiet, held fields of color.
How to Read Abstraction
There is no wrong response. Notice where your eye goes, how the colors make you feel, whether the surface feels urgent or serene. The meaning is not hidden behind the painting; it happens in the space between the work and you.
A few things reward slower looking. Surface and facture — is the paint thin and stained into the canvas, or built up in ridges you could read with your fingers? Temperature — does the palette pull warm and forward or cool and recessive? Scale relative to gesture — a small canvas with large, confident marks reads differently than a large canvas built from many small ones. And pacing: give a piece more than a glance. Abstraction that seemed quiet on first look often opens up once you've spent a few minutes with it, the way a piece of music reveals its structure on a second listen.
Why Abstraction Resonates With Collectors Now
Figurative and portrait work tends to be legible immediately — you know what you're looking at within a second, which is part of its appeal. Abstraction works on a longer timeline. Collectors who live with an abstract piece often report that their reading of it shifts over months or years, which is precisely why it tends to hold up as a long-term acquisition rather than a one-time visual hit. A painting that announces its entire meaning on day one has less room to grow with you.
There's also a market logic to it. Abstraction doesn't date itself to a specific cultural reference the way narrative or figurative work sometimes can, so it ages independently of trend cycles. And because the emotional register is set by color and gesture rather than subject matter, abstract works tend to sit comfortably across very different interiors and collections — which is part of why galleries built around emerging artists, including this one, carry a deep bench of abstraction alongside figurative and symbol-based work.
Abstraction at Art of NOMA
Genoveva Kelleher works across a body of paintings she frames as excavating the soul as a place, moving through consciousness in layered, large-scale fields — her Synergetic Atmosphere, at 220 × 190 cm, is one of the largest examples of that practice in the gallery's current inventory. Molly van Amerongen builds quiet, atmospheric fields in oil and marble dust on wood, in a register that sits close to Rothko's color-field tradition without repeating it. Roti MartÃnez translates ancestral and Aztec symbol — animals, deities, glyphs — into mood and movement rather than illustration, so the reference points sit underneath the abstraction instead of on its surface. Fernanda Rivero paints from pure intuition and energy, closer to the gestural end of the spectrum.
Two more artists worth knowing if this register interests you: Jorge Tellaeche treats transformation as geometry, building structured, hard-edged abstraction out of Aztec-influenced forms — a useful counterpoint to the looser, gestural work above. Alexandra Connolly works from the opposite direction, an oil painter of the city's texture whose canvases draw on graffiti and street art to build dense, psychedelic surfaces that read as pure energy before they read as anything else.
Watch Jorge Tellaeche's studio interview and Alexandra Connolly's studio interview on the Art of NOMA YouTube channel to see how each artist works firsthand.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a painting "abstract" rather than figurative?
An abstract painting doesn't depict a recognizable subject — a person, object, or scene. Instead it works through color, gesture, texture, and composition directly. Some abstraction is fully non-representational; other work sits closer to the boundary, gesturing at a landscape or figure without depicting one outright.
How do I know if I like an abstract painting, or if I'm supposed to feel something specific?
There's no specific feeling you're supposed to have. Pay attention to your actual reaction — where your eye moves, whether the palette feels calming or agitating, whether you want to look longer or look away. That reaction is the point, not a stand-in for a "correct" interpretation.
Is abstract art a reasonable choice for a first-time collector?
Yes, with the same caveat that applies to any first acquisition: buy what holds your attention over repeated viewings, not just on first impression. Because abstraction rewards slower looking, it's worth spending real time with a piece, in photos and ideally in person, before committing.
Do abstract paintings need to match my existing interior?
No. Because abstraction communicates through color and mood rather than subject matter, it tends to set the tone of a room rather than needing to match it. Most collectors choose an abstract piece for how it feels on its own, then let the room adjust around it.
Explore more original abstract paintings, browse all of our artists, or reach out about a specific work like Terrain Remains to start a conversation.
