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The aim and purpose of abstract art was repeatedly questioned, as it had been used for political purposes (by the CIA, for example, as with abstract expressionism). It was criticized for its alleged lack of a basic political attitude. As an abstract painter, I was interested in what abstraction actually is and I began to study the literature, the critics and the artistic positions of the individual artists. I examined the relationship between abstraction and operation (actions, decisions, effects) by means of an image analysis in order to show how the artists Kasimir Malewitsch, Emma Kunz, Paul Klee, Frank Stella, Toon Verhoef, Katharina Grosse and Carmen Herrera developed their concept of abstraction. With the question of how figures of thought can be made visible, I consulted Gilles Deleuze’s terms (“diagram”, “assemblage”, “sensation” or “becoming”) and brought them into a dialogue with the artistic positions. Abstraction also proved to be a bridge between art and science through intuition, analysis and thought. The point was to explore abstraction as a means of finding a form for thought, how abstraction arrives at such a form or transforms thought into material, and the role of operation in this process. Furthermore, the question of how abstract concepts that cannot be represented can be made visible was investigated. The pictorial abstraction was difficult to convey verbally; rather, it has to (invent) its aesthetic form without reference to fixed codes. The operation examines a making/working and the effect of abstraction. This connects the form of abstraction and “a new form of thinking” which according to Deleuze and Guattari is associated with the anti-dictatorial and anarchic, even anarchistic aspect of abstraction.
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