Totem

Different times call for different images, so thought Adolph Gottlieb, and in the tumultuous times during and after the Second World War, the images that were need were Pictographs. Developed by Gottlieb as a way to unify his disparate interests in surrealism, geometric abstraction and native art from across the Americas, they serve as readable images that transform symbols into meaning. They are a way to translate the complications, neurosis, and chaos of modernity into something accessible to the subconscious, cutting through the noise of a difficult world with abstraction. Yet, abstraction was not a word Gottlieb liked to use, he said that “to my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.” The symbols, neatly divided into grids, becomes figures, faces, creatures of the recesses of our mind that seem to communicate wordlessly of a world within us.