Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Emily Swaim reviews Shaping Abstraction at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California.

Oskar Fischinger. Rhythmic Tapestry, 1952; oil on canvas; 17 1/4 x 22 1/8 in. Courtesy of the Harriet and Maurice Gregg Collection of American Abstract Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Full disclosure—I have embarrassingly little education in abstract art. In fact, I chose to review Shaping Abstraction in order to remedy this ignorance. However, when I stepped inside the exhibition room, I panicked. I was surrounded by a glut of squiggly lines and shapes, and I had no clue what they meant, let alone how to write about them.

Then I saw my savior in the center of the room: a drip painting by Rolph Scarlett. The colors were mostly unassuming grays and browns, and the design visually pleasing yet utterly chaotic. There were no symbols to parse or patterns to analyze. There wasn’t even a title. Strangely enough, this inscrutability drew me in. It gave me permission to approach this work and others in the exhibition from an aesthetic standpoint.

I examined a collection of lithographs by Frederick Hammersley located on one side of an architectural column. Each square in the eight-by-eight grid of the work Value Line, September 11 (1949) was a different shade of gray. The uniformity of shape, size, and color forced my attention to the lone variable. My eyes played tic-tac-toe with the squares, comparing values I hadn’t realized were distinct.

My mind clicked. This wasn’t a random assortment of boxes—this was an experiment. Hammersley was taking an element and pushing it to its limit, like how free verse poetry will forgo form to focus on language. I glanced at the other works. Most weren’t as formally restricted as Hammersley’s lithographs, but I could see a focus in them—intent I hadn’t noticed before.

I felt confident enough now to circle the room. The pieces became more formally complex as I walked; bright, minimalist shapes gave way to subtle gradients and busy compositions. Toward the end of my route, I came across Oskar Fischinger’s Rhythmic Tapestry (1952). The piece displayed a series of overlaid translucent shapes that gradually grew brighter in color as they became more centrally located. The collage culminated in a golden figure resembling a nautilus shell. Without the visual context gained from viewing the other works, I would have obsessed over the piece’s meaning and would have made dubious inferences about nature, repetition, and color theory, only to arrive at the conclusion that the piece was about deism.

Instead, I enjoyed how the colors interacted, made note of the arrangement of lines, and moved on. When I was done, I looked around the room one last time. What I had initially taken as experiments in chaos was now a diverse collection of pieces, each with its unique approach to the elements of visual aesthetic. I didn’t discover a message in them, but I did find sense in the meaninglessness.

Shaping Abstraction is on view in Gallery 11 at the de Young Museum through August 30, 2015.

Emily Swaim is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. She has a BA from Kenyon College and is currently pursuing her MFA from the California College of the Arts.