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What has happened — the death of a child — is too primal, too animalistic, too fundamentally incommunicable for notions like “consolation” to apply.

And nothing is more isolating, more incommunicable, than the grief of a parent who has been unable to save their child’s life.

When Ishmael stops by the Whaleman's Chapel before his fateful journey, "each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable."

Abstract artists, including Alberto Burri, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Jack Whitten and Mark Bradford, all found unique ways to use such materials to conjure the weight of incommunicable things.

The incommunicable thing at the heart of grief helps explain why abstraction is one of its most powerful expressions, and why so many artists in this show turn either to visual abstraction or to the abstractions of music and language.