From artists creatively blending performance and painting to creators making sense of information systems through visual art, here are five abstract artists on Instagram whose work is bound to add vigour and inspiration to your week.
Caroline Denervaud
Swiss artist Caroline Denervaud’s work is so graceful and fluid, you can’t help but hold your breath. It’s no wonder her paintings feel like movement itself: trained in classical and contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London before studying fine art, Denervaud intentionally merges performance and visual art within her practice. Her process often begins with an improvised dance, allowing her body to leave traces across the canvas using charcoal or ink, forming the starting point of a composition.
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Stanley Whitney
American artist Stanley Whitney is known for his vivid abstract paintings and prints, where colour becomes the underlying structure of the work itself. Drawing inspiration from figures such as Piet Mondrian and Giorgio Morandi, as well as American quilt-making traditions, Whitney approaches painting with a striking spontaneity. As he puts it: “I follow the paintings wherever they take me. If the painting goes out the door, I follow it out the door; if it goes out the window, I follow it out the window.”
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Thomas Trum
Hailing from the Netherlands, Thomas Trum feels compelled to explore the abstract in his artwork, especially the concept of traces. Focusing on line and colour, Trum enjoys using unique tools like felt-tip pens or rotating spraying machines to create arresting artwork with a bright, three-dimensional effect.
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Derek Lerner
NYC-based Derek Lerner engages with the “creation, control, use and experience” of systems in his art. His interpretations of information spaces including ones related to tax evasion, identity theft, the metaverse and urbanism results in a vibrant, fascinating visual world.
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Karen O’Brien
Karen O’Brien works across pastel, acrylic and mixed media to produce richly textured abstract paintings on canvas and paper. More recently, the artist has experimented with freezing floral arrangements in blocks of ice and documenting the process photographically over several days, later translating those frozen transformations into mesmerising painted forms.
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