“Just a little trippy” is how a spokeswoman for the Wolfsonian-Florida International University museum in Miami Beach describes one of the institution’s current shows, the Pursuit of Abstraction (until 16 April 2017). The exhibition features works made between 1900 and 1960 by 49 artists, including Gertrude Hermes, Agnes Pelton and Ida O’Keeffe—Georgia’s younger sister—who “experimented with new forms of expression to reintroduce mystery into everyday life as modernisation eroded mysticism”, the show’s curator, Matthew Abess, said in a press release. The works, which reject a purely scientific, rational and secular worldview in favour of new ways of showing spirituality, mainly come from the Wolfsonian’s collection, and include paintings, prints, sculptures and photographs, among other media. One highlight is a double-sided theatre curtain by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1920 obverse, 1931 reverse) that shows a Dionysian—or, cosmic fantasy—scene, which the artist painted for an amateur Swiss theatre troupe that he befriended after relocating to Switzerland from Berlin at the end of the First World War.
