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The Unusual Suspects: A View of Abstraction examines some key elements of today’s abstract painting. While scarcely an atlas, it does provide a way to look at the current state of affairs. The typical 20th century process of movement formation stopped (especially for painting and doubly so for abstraction) in the late 1980s or at the latest, the early 1990s. Yet all the while, painting continued unabated. The art in this show, made by painters ranging in age from their 30s to their 90s, does not fit neatly into sets of fixed categories, but rather organizes itself around related points and orientations on the larger map of abstraction – in this case an interest in color, logical organization, careful facture, and indirect but compelling social and theoretical reference. In the convention-encompassed precincts of painting, the continually expanding body of work coming into the world will, by its nature, seek and find places to settle. In doing so, the accepted distance between points on the spectrum of style will be altered and new affinities and correspondences revealed. This creates an interconnected map rather than a logical flow chart, a shifting network rather than an Alfred Barr-like diagram of originality and influence. Such an ordering is not only non-hierarchical and non-linear, but in a metaphorical way, non-planar. It is like a loose grid inscribed on a sheet of paper, rendered three-dimensional as the paper is turned and twisted.