"Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain situates the issue of abstraction in art on a new historiographic and theoretical basis, particularly in relation to recent decolonial scholarship. The chapters discuss abstraction not as a process of stripping contexts into select variables that can be distantly manipulated (such the metropole ruling over the colony); but rather, as pure creative potential—the white canvas onto which Malevich painted his Suprematist forms—which survives after everything else that people love and by which they live is lost to sight."

"Standing on top of ruins and “scan[ning] the horizon of time … with open eye,” as the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and CoBrA supporter Willem Sandberg wrote in a 1946 editorial of the journal Open oog: avantgardecahier voor visuele vormgeving (Open Eye: Avant-Garde Notebook for Visual Design), artists and architects were left to reassemble what was under their feet. Only with those available materials—and through the need to affirm their own existence—could they build toward a liberated future. Such visions that are presented in Forgács’s timely and important volume would soon, however, join the growing pile of wreckage, as the angel of history, summoned at the “zero hour,” proved not only to be a saving grace but a harbinger of another catastrophe to come."_Alexander Bala. in:

Éva Forgács, Ph.D. (1992), is an Adjunct Professor at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and Professor Emerita of the László Moholy-Nagy University, Budapest. Her publications include Malevich and Interwar Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2022) and other monographs and essays on Modernism and contemporary art and culture.