Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls

Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls presents an installation that reimagines the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court through the work of four artists whose practices are rooted in abstraction. Each artist transforms one of the monumental walls of the space, creating a dynamic environment defined by color, scale, and material experimentation. The installation is inspired by the museum’s extensive holdings of paintings by Leon Polk Smith, whose hard-edge abstractions and shaped canvases provide the conceptual starting point for the exhibition. Smith’s work emphasizes clarity of form and precise delineations of color, establishing a dialogue between historical abstraction and contemporary practices. In response, three Brooklyn-based artists—Maya Hayuk, José Parlá, and Kennedy Yanko—contribute newly created works that extend the language of abstraction into immersive spatial environments. Hayuk’s tactile modular works emphasize vibrant color and pattern; Parlá’s large environmental paintings merge gestural mark-making with architectural scale; and Yanko’s sculptural works combine metal and paint skins to create dramatic surfaces that blur the line between painting and sculpture. Organized by Catherine Futter, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, and Erika Umali, Assistant Curator of Collections at the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition highlights abstraction as a living and evolving artistic language. The installation invites visitors to move through the Beaux-Arts Court as a fully activated visual environment where historical and contemporary abstraction intersect.