Brian Rutenberg

Teodora Guererra’s abstract artistic vision has evolved throughout her years spent painting and teaching in Fairfield County, Connecticut; Tucson, Arizona, and upstate New York. Arizona’s naturally radiant landscape and arid climate led her to experiment with rich under-painting and vivid color; while the shifting seasons of the East Coast inspired Guererra to pursue dripping and staining techniques. Her focus has always been pushing the limits in her paintings through experimentation with new materials.

“As an artist, painting can be tormenting and sublime at the same time," Guererra says of her work. "I'm a big risk taker, experimenting with different materials to layer, stain and saturate color on large canvases. My most successful work achieves a sense of fluid movement with saturated color, that is complex yet minimalistic. The end result should be a painting that dances across the canvas and quiets all the noise.”

Guererra received her undergraduate and graduate art degrees from Southern Connecticut University, the College of Saint Rose and Skidmore College. Her paintings can be found in public and private collections across the U.S., including the Allmen Health and Wellness Center for Women in New York and SUNY Brockport, NY, Williams-Sonoma, San Francisco, CA. Her influences are Pat Steir, John McCracken, Helen Frankenthaler, Donald Judd, Bernar Venet, Agnes Martin and Brian Rutenberg.

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Beginning in the early 20th century, abstract art became a leading style of modernism. Rather than portray the world in a way that represented reality, as had been the dominating style of Western art in the previous centuries, abstract paintings, prints and sculptures are marked by a shift to geometric forms, gestural shapes and experimentation with color to express ideas, subject matter and scenes.

Although abstract art flourished in the early 1900s, propelled by movements like Fauvism and Cubism, it was rooted in the 19th century. In the 1840s, J.M.W. Turner emphasized light and motion for atmospheric paintings in which concrete details were blurred, and Paul Cézanne challenged traditional expectations of perspective in the 1890s.

Some of the earliest abstract artists — Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint — expanded on these breakthroughs while using vivid colors and forms to channel spiritual concepts. Painter Piet Mondrian, a Dutch pioneer of the art movement, explored geometric abstraction partly owing to his belief in Theosophy, which is grounded in a search for higher spiritual truths and embraces philosophers of the Renaissance period and medieval mystics. Black Square, a daringly simple 1913 work by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, was a watershed statement on creating art that was free “from the dead weight of the real world,” as he later wrote.

Surrealism in the 1920s, led by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim and others, saw painters creating abstract pieces in order to connect to the subconscious. When Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York during the mid-20th century, it similarly centered on the process of creation, in which Helen Frankenthaler’s expressive “soak-stain” technique, Jackson Pollock’s drips of paint, and Mark Rothko’s planes of color were a radical new type of abstraction.

Conceptual art, Pop art, Hard-Edge painting and many other movements offered fresh approaches to abstraction that continued into the 21st century, with major contemporary artists now exploring it, including Anish Kapoor, Mark Bradford, El Anatsui and Julie Mehretu.

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