Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time. –Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb was a leading American abstract expressionist painter of the 20th century, renown for employing invented abstract symbols that transcend time, place and language in his artwork to achieve universal meaning. Inspired by Surrealism’s automatic drawing, mythological symbols, and primitive tribal art, Gottlieb created a highly developed lexicon of simple abstract forms that are evocative and relatable to a larger universal language. In the late 1950s through the 1960s, Gottlieb produced his Burst paintings, the last series in his oeuvre. These paintings are divided into two parts, a celestial zone and a terrestrial zone, in which a sun-like disk hovers above an explosive, irregular calligraphic mark. Untitled, 1967, demonstrates how Gottlieb’s pure abstraction employs subconscious symbols and Abstract Expressionist marks to express authentic feeling.