There's a word Evanly Schindler keeps returning to: urgency. It's the invisible thread connecting the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and • 50s
to the artists making work right now, and it's the force behind BlackBook Art Gallery's 2026 season in Southampton.
'The emotional temperature is eerily similar,· Schindler says of the parallels between the postwar moment and the present. Where artists like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner were building meaning from the rubble of collapsed Old World structurespolitical. spiritual. aesthetic-today's artists are navigating something equally unsettling: multiple wars, digital saturation, political polarization, the erosion of shared reality. The answer, both times, is the same-reinvention.
