An abstract state

“Empty Red Room,” Michael Phillips’ oil on canvas painting, essentially has its own wall in “Abstract Art in South Carolina, 1949-2012,” the exhibit that opens at the State Museum today.

The squiggly, snaking lines and boxes that make up the painting suggest more than a room. One may, perhaps, see how all the rooms they’ve ever called their own have been connected. Or something like that. There’s plenty to see when abstract art, a visual discipline where line and shape — or lack thereof — is the focus. (if ART Gallery is presenting “Contemporary Carolina Abstraction I: Carl Blair, Ashlynn Browning, Laura Spong, Katie Walker & Don Zurlo” at Gallery 80808.)

The museum’s show, which features more than 40 artists and 90 works of art, highlights the state’s abstract contributions over the past 60 years. (Not all of the artists are natives, but all have had a significant connection to the state.) The work exhibited in the Lipscomb Art Gallery is virile and dazzling. Some pieces, while not the size of “Empty Red Room,” are also quite big.

“A lot of artists work on the large canvases to have the room to create the images that they need,” Paul Matheny, the museum’s curator of art, said.

He pointed to Phillips’ “Empty Red Room” as an obvious example.

“He’s all about the movement and action of the painting, how he’s applying the paint to the canvas,” Matheny said. “How the movement emphasizes the composition of what the final piece ends (up) being.”

Size and shape extend to how the pieces are shown. Michael Tyzack’s “Days Beyond Recall,” a 1982 acrylic on canvas punctuated by a yellow lighting bolt, is hung by a corner so that the canvas is a diamond rather than a square.

Some shapes are indecipherable or look like something familiar. Some are stretched the length of a piece in alternating and at times dizzying patchwork patterns. Some shapes cause chaos, as in Emery Bopp’s “No. 3 Landscape,” a circa 1967 oil on canvas painting. The top half is straight lines, while the bottom includes shredded unshaped pieces of canvas stitched into the work. One of those pieces brought to mind a wooden bat sawed in half by a Mariano Rivera cutter.

To be sure, there are smaller, intimate pieces where detail and process take charge. (There’s sculpture, too.) Enid Williams’ “Modern Organic,” a 2009 work, is a maze of circles. The circles themselves come in varying sizes. There are what look like donuts, bagels, bracelets and the dots above “i’s” is the congenial piece of circuitous form and color. (Williams is a 2012 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She is one of just two state artists to receive the grant that has assisted with personal and professional artist expenses since 1985.)

William Halsey and his wife. Corrie McCallum, who met at USC in the ’30s, were pioneers of abstract art in the state.

“There’s been a lot happening in abstract art in the state since the late ’40s,” Matheny said.

Halsey and McCallum have art in the exhibit, as does Myrtle Beach native Brian Rutenberg, an art-world star. James Busby, a rising star, dropped off a newly completed work Monday morning.

Mike Williams’ “Figure with Fish,” a 2010 acrylic on canvas painting, reveals a human figure and what appears to be a fish. That’s what caught this reporter’s eye. But what makes abstract art art — is it the artist’s eye or the viewer’s taste? Matheny thinks it’s a combination of the two.

“I think of it just like music,” he said. “It’s just like a musician composes the song. You have the different elements. You have the color and texture and rhythm of the painting. And all that sort of works together.”

If abstract art is like music, it’s more like jazz than, say, cookie-cutter pop music. Still, one has to be popular to get noticed.