Bruno David is pleased to present Allusive, an exhibition by Chicago-based artist William Conger. This will be his second solo exhibition with the gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery will publish a catalogue of the artist’s work with an in-depth exhibition history and bibliography. Much contemporary abstract art has long centered on the literal art object and aims to exclude reference or allusion to what’s not literally present. Now, more and more, recent abstraction evokes real or imagined objects and experience not actually depicted. In 1981, William Conger proposed the term Allusive Abstraction to distinguish his own work an abstraction that shared some traits with other Chicago artists, some earlier American painting (like Arthur Dove) and with Chicago Imagist artists. Art historian and critic Mary Matthews Gedo wrote about Allusive Abstraction in Arts Magazine, Art Criticism, and elsewhere in the 1980s. Some critics now use the term Abstract Imagism to include Allusive Abstraction. Conger said, “Over the decades my work has remained purposely allusive and formally abstract as it has also explored many alternatives. My newer work is flatter and more evenly colored with more mixed figure-ground paradoxes than my earlier work which is layered with modulated shapes. But it still alludes to landscape and objects, even anatomy, without ever giving up the primacy of purely abstract form.”