Gallery 8 & 9

With some 55 paintings, works on paper and collages, Romare Bearden: Abstraction is the first exhibition to fully examine and contextualize the artist’s significant body of abstract work. Recognized as one of the most creative and original visual artists of the 20th century, Romare Bearden’s prolific and distinguished career spanned nearly 50 years. This exhibition, which debuts at the Gibbes before traveling to venues across the country, also includes pieces created before and after his most direct engagement with abstraction (among these, the figurative collages for which he is most well-known). The exhibition emphasizes the importance of abstraction in the artist’s oeuvre, its significant contribution to the overall Bearden narrative and marks the artist’s place within the New York avant-garde of the 1950s-60s.