The Beaux-Arts facade of the Art Institute of Chicago on Michigan Avenue, floodlit at night, with one of its bronze lions at right

Art Institute of ChicagoGrant Park / Loop

Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury

Ended27 June 2026 – 19 October 2026$32

This exhibition has ended.

Sixty-five artists from more than 23 countries trace how abstraction emerged as a powerful visual language between 1940 and 1970, a period of global upheaval and transformation.

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On now All of November 2026

Deborah Remington rubbed soot from her own fireplace into muslin to get the deep, velvety black of Soot Series #1, with a single symbol floating in the middle. Two of her sketchbooks working toward the series sit beside it.

Nearly everything here is on paper: about 67 works by 65 artists from more than 23 countries, all from the museum's own collection, and half of them on view for the first time. Pollock, Rothko and Kusama share Galleries 124 to 127 with Gego, Nasreen Mohamedi and Rasheed Araeen. You walk past Lucio Fontana's torn, punctured sheet over aluminium foil, Otto Piene's board scorched by burning solvent, and an Ellsworth Kelly brush drawing cut into twenty squares and rearranged by chance.

Expect small sheets rather than big canvases. The four galleries are on the first floor of the Michigan Avenue building, and the show closes on 19 October, so there is about a week left.

Look for

Remington's Soot Series #1
Look in Gallery 127B for fireplace soot rubbed into muslin, a velvety black field around one floating symbol, with her two sketchbooks for the series nearby.
Otto Piene's Fire Painting
In Gallery 127A, a thin red board Piene doused with solvent and set alight in 1967, left with black burn marks where the fire took.
Jacqueline Lamba's night crossing
Her 1943 drawing in Gallery 125 shows the night sky from her 1941 escape from France by boat: a sun over the water upper right, hair-dotted organic forms swirling through graphite.
Six Mira Schendel monotypes
In Gallery 127B, sheets of Japanese paper she laid on inked glass and drew into with a finger or a nail, so each line is a single pressed gesture.
Ellsworth Kelly's Study for Cité
In Gallery 124B, a brush-and-ink drawing cut into twenty squares and laid down in an order chosen by chance, held with brown gummed tape.