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With the exhibition Poetry of Light, the Museum Frieder Burda is celebrating one of the great pioneers of Abstract Expressionism: the painter, sculptor and photographer Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992). Around 140 works from six decades provide an opulent overview of the multifaceted oeuvre of one of the most important artists of American postwar abstraction.

Alongside colleagues such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Pousette-Dart played a prominent role in the formation of the New York School, which ushered in the international triumph of free abstraction in the 1940s. Like many artists in the orbit of Abstract Expressionism, he extensively dealt with themes such as myth, archaism, and spirituality. Early works bear witness to his keen interest in European painting of the interwar period. From the 1960s onwards, he turned to large-format all-over compositions – colorful and heavily textured images which typically confront the viewer with the immersive power of an environment. A constant in Pousette-Dart’s work was his lifelong fascination with the emotional power of light – light as shimmer and glean, light as a dazzling iridescent reflection or light as a radiant force associated with the release of boundless energy and the power of illumination. This interest particularly comes to the fore in the numerous late paintings that seem to mirror the spellbinding beauty of the night sky – but also in compositions for which he drew inspiration from the magnificent sheen of medieval metalwork and Gothic stained-glass windows. The visual appeal of reflective sheen also underpins the many brass objects, which Pousette-Dart created throughout his lengthy career: handcrafted items that blur the boundaries between avant-garde sculpture and jewelry and which provide a lexicon of elemental forms that frequently recur in the artist’s painted imagery.