Painter, sculptor, and printmaker Adolph Gottlieb was part of the first generation of abstract expressionists. Featuring pictographs and mythological symbols, as well as an “emotional intensity through both color and line,” Gottlieb’s oeuvre evolved from surrealism to abstraction. He drew inspiration from automatic drawing and theories of leading psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In his famous Burst paintings, a sun-like orb looms above a black mass, suggesting the “spatial relationship of landscape and the elemental struggle of history painting.”
Source: The Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Artnet
