Sculptural shapes seem to float on planes of teal blue and green, their impossibly interlocking forms silhouetted by shadow, highlights and line. Like all of Abts’s work, this painting is determinedly non-representational. Its strict geometries do not symbolize or describe anything else, nor are we given any hint of emotion or information. It is an exploration of color and space, in which subtle shifts of both create unexpected effects: movement, stillness, depth. Abts was born in Germany, and the titles of her works derive from German first names. She creates small canvases, always the same size, using a labor- intensive technique in which thin layers of paint are laid like strata, over-painted again and again as she changes her mind and works intuitively, often for months, on a single canvas. Like the American painter Jasper Johns, she is interested in a painting as both image and object, representing nothing but itself.