Junge Kunst 40: Agnes Pelton

The spiritually inspired paintings of Agnes Pelton (1881-1961) are rooted in the California desert, near Cathedral City, a place where the artist settled in 1932 and lived until her death. Her paintings are "like little windows" that open the view into the interior, the painter wrote about her highly symbolic paintings.

In the 1920s, the Stuttgart-born American Agnes Pelton discovered abstract painting for herself, as it offered the opportunity to translate esoteric themes, including numerology and Agni Yoga, into images and to interpret earth and light spiritually. Although she repeatedly painted conventional landscapes and portraits, she was celebrated for her abstract compositions in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the USA and abroad in the 1930s and 40s. "... for the eye alone it is an oasis of beauty," the "American Art News" hailed her work, while other reviewers marveled at the organic shapes and lines that created metaphysical landscapes. Like her fellow artist Georgia O'Keeffe, Pelton retreated from the hustle and bustle of the East Coast art scene to the desert in order to convey a "message of light to the world" with her works, beyond the mainstream. After her death, Pelton's work fell out of the public eye for a long time, but today she is even more appreciative of her important artistic contribution to American modernism.