The Language of Abstraction
A history of abstract art, where it lives today, and why Perth is quietly becoming one of Australia's most compelling cities for contemporary figurative painting.
By Jade Samantha Fairbairn · 8 min read
There is a moment in front of a great abstract painting when language fails you. You do not describe what you see. You feel it first. That pause — the one before the words arrive, is what abstract art has always been reaching for.
It is a language that took centuries to develop, a gradual loosening of the grip that realism held over Western art. And it is a language that is still being written today, including here in Perth, Western Australia, where a generation of painters is translating it into something deeply personal, deeply felt, and unmistakably now.
Where it began: the long road away from representation
To understand abstract art, you have to understand what artists were breaking from. For most of Western art history, painting served a documentary function. It recorded faces, battles, saints, and landscapes. The measure of a great painter was their ability to render the world as it appeared.
The cracks began forming in the mid-nineteenth century. The Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Degas - began prioritising sensation over accuracy. They were not painting a haystack; they were painting the feeling of afternoon light falling across one. The subject became secondary to the experience of it.
1890s: Paul Cézanne begins distorting perspective to convey psychological weight. He calls painting "a harmony running parallel to nature" rather than a copy of it. This single idea plants the seed of everything that follows.
1910: Wassily Kandinsky produces what many historians consider the first purely abstract painting. He is thinking about music, specifically, the way a piece of music can move you without depicting anything. He wants paint to do the same.
1920s: The Bauhaus school formalises the relationship between colour, form, and emotion. Artists like Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian reduce painting to its essential geometry. Abstraction becomes a philosophy, not just a style.
1940s: Abstract Expressionism emerges in New York. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning make the act of painting itself the subject. The gesture, the scale, the physical encounter with canvas, all of it matters.
"Abstract art is not the absence of subject matter. It is the presence of pure feeling."
The figurative turn: when abstraction found the body again
By the late twentieth century, a counter-movement was quietly gathering momentum. Painters began reintroducing the human figure not with photographic precision, but with the vocabulary abstraction had spent a century developing. The result was something new: figurative abstraction.
Artists like Marlene Dumas, Jenny Saville, and later Cecily Brown were painting bodies that pulsed with psychological and emotional weight. The figure was not decorative. It was structural. It carried meaning the way a word carries meaning not through appearance alone, but through context, placement, and the quality of the mark itself.
This is the lineage that the most compelling contemporary painters are working within today. The body as landscape. The gesture as language. The palette as mood.
Abstract art in Perth: a city finding its voice
Perth has long occupied a particular position in the Australian art landscape — geographically isolated, creatively independent. That distance from the eastern-seaboard art establishment has historically been framed as a disadvantage. Increasingly, it reads as freedom.
The Perth abstract art scene in 2026 is characterised by painters who have absorbed international contemporary movements the gestural figuration of London's Sadie Coles HQ stable, the earthy sensuality of Berlin's neo-expressionists and translated them into something distinctly West Australian. Rawer. More connected to light, land, and a particular quality of solitude.
Collectors and interior designers across Perth are increasingly seeking original abstract art that carries genuine emotional intelligence rather than decorative wallpaper. There is a real appetite for work that asks something of the viewer.
The Her Rebellion series: figurative abstraction made in Perth
The Her Rebellion series by Perth artist Jade Samantha Fairbairn sits precisely at this intersection of gesture, body, and meaning. Painted in acrylics on premium cotton canvas, each work in the series uses the female form as its primary landscape not to depict, but to illuminate.
The palette across the series draws from deep ochres, terracotta, umber, pale peach, sage, and bronze: colours that feel both ancient and entirely contemporary. The brushwork is confident and sweeping, each stroke carrying the particular authority of a mark that was not second-guessed.
These are not paintings about women. They are paintings that think and feel like women.
The Year of the Fire Horse — Original · Acrylic on canvas · 1000 x 1000mm · Her Rebellion series
Raw umber, red ochre and deep bronze ground a gestural equine figure of mythic presence. The rarest sign in Chinese astrology, painted with the energy it carries.
Unburdened — Original · Acrylic on canvas · 600 x 900mm · Her Rebellion series
Rich umber, hints of sage and pale peach. A figure mid-exhale, the particular softness of a moment after something has been let go.
Buying original abstract art in Perth
For those looking to buy original abstract art in Perth, the question is rarely about investment (though the work of emerging Australian painters is attracting serious collector interest). It is about living with something that changes how a room feels and how you feel in it.
Original paintings carry something that prints, however beautifully reproduced, cannot: the physical record of a hand making decisions in real time. The texture. The layering. The ghost of a mark that was almost made differently. That presence is not sentimental it is structural. It is why original art commands a room in a way that reproduction never quite does.
For those who prefer to begin with a print, canvas and fine art matt prints from the Her Rebellion series are available through the Jade Samantha Fairbairn online store, printed to archival standards and available framed or unframed. Shop Prints.
The question abstract art keeps asking
Kandinsky believed that colour and form could produce in the viewer the same kind of internal vibration that music produces what he called "inner necessity." A century later, the best abstract painting still operates on this principle.
It does not explain itself. It does not need to. It exists, like Fairbairn's own work, the way a heartbeat exists: steady, luminous, impossible to ignore.
If you are searching for Perth abstract art, original figurative painting in Perth, or contemporary Australian women artists, you can explore the full collection at jadefairbairnart.com.au