Since then, numerous museums and private collections, including the Tate Modern, London, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, have acquired works by Federle; in 1997, he represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale. Yet discussions of his art have tended to eschew the issues at stake in the Basel controversy. Three and a half decades later, the exhibition Helmut Federle. 19 E. 21 St., 6 Large Paintings revisits the episode, presenting six paintings created between 1980 and 2005 and a number of works on paper from the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings) as well as historic non-European ceramics from the artist’s own collection. This juxtaposition underscores Federle’s conviction that abstraction is much more than the absence of representation: it is a personal continuum that extends across time and transcends boundaries of culture.

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