Abstract Illusionism

About

Look for brushstrokes that throw shadows, bands of colour that seem to lift off the canvas, or ribbons that curl in front of a flat ground. The picture stays abstract, yet it borrows the old tools of trompe-l'oeil to suggest a shallow, believable space in front of or behind the surface.

The American critic Barbara Rose gave the tendency its name in the mid-1970s, when painters such as James Havard and George Green began giving gestural smears and hard-edged shapes a convincing depth. It ran against the insistence on an emphatically flat picture that had governed much abstract painting in the previous decade. The idea keeps returning: Tauba Auerbach's Fold paintings, begun around 2009, are made on canvas that was creased and spray-painted before being stretched taut, so they record the ghost of folds that are no longer there.