Please select from the artworks below to view abstract artwork from the permanent collection including some fine examples of Scottish abstract art:

Definition: Abstract art is a term which can generally be applied to any non-representational art (most decorative art, for example), but which is more specifically used, from the early 20th century onwards, to describe painting and sculpture which are deliberately non-representational. Implicit to abstract art is the notion that the work of art exists in its own right, and not necessarily as a mirror of reality. Abstract art applies in its strictest sense to forms of 20th century Western art that reject representation and have no start or finishing-point in nature, as distinct from processes of abstraction from nature or from objects (a recurring tendency across many cultures and periods that can be traced as far back as Palaeolithic cave painting such as at Lescaux).

The Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) is generally credited with producing the first abstract painting c.1910. In the decade 1910–20 a number of movements principally Cubism, Suprematism, and De Stijl either developed or embraced abstraction.

In its many forms abstraction has been one of the main preoccupations of much modern art.