I used to think geometric abstraction was the visual equivalent of a very serious philosophy seminar—all hard edges and color theory, no room for anything remotely fun.
Then I stumbled into Neo Geo, this weird 1980s movement that somehow managed to take the stern, minimalist language of shapes and grids and smash it straight into the Day-Glo chaos of pop culture. It happened mostly in New York, where a bunch of artists—Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons in his early phase—decided that the austere legacy of Mondrian and the Color Field painters was ripe for a remix. They wanted geometry, sure, but geometry that could coexist with consumerism, with the visual noise of advertising, with the kind of fluorescent oranges and electric pinks you’d see on a cereal box. The movement got its name from a 1986 exhibition, and it was never meant to last forever—most movements aren’t, honestly—but it left this strange, vibrant mark on how we think about abstraction and mass culture colliding. What made Neo Geo so disorienting, and maybe so compelling, was that it refused to pick a side: it was both earnest about formal rigor and deeply ironic about the commodification of art itself.
The artists weren’t shy about their influences. Halley, for instance, painted these bright, cell-like structures he called “prisons,” geometric forms that referenced both modernist grids and the isolating architecture of contemporary life—office cubicles, circuit boards, urban planning gone sterile. His colors were synthetic, almost toxic-looking, borrowed from industrial design and commercial signage. It was geometry, but it felt artifical, mass-produced, like something you might find in a mall atrium or a subway ad.
When Hard Edges Met Commodity Fetishism and Irony Culture
Here’s the thing: Neo Geo arrived at a moment when the art world was already tangled up in questions about originality, authorship, and whether anything could exist outside the logic of capitalism.
The Pictures Generation had spent the late ’70s and early ’80s deconstructing images, showing us how mass media shapes identity. Neo Geo took that skepticism and applied it to abstraction itself—a realm that had always pretended to be pure, autonomous, above the fray. These artists treated geometric forms like ready-mades, like found objects lifted from the visual language of corporate America. Ashley Bickerton’s work, for example, often resembled sleek product design, complete with logos and brand-like insignias. Jeff Koons was exhibiting vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas cases, turning consumer goods into sculptural objects that mimicked minimalist aesthetics. The line between art object and commodity was deliberatley blurred, maybe even erased. It was exhausting to look at sometimes—so much gloss, so much surface—but that was sort of the point.
Wait—maybe I’m overstating the cynicism here.
Because there was also something genuinely playful about Neo Geo, a sense that these artists were having fun with the collision of high and low culture. The fluorescent colors weren’t just ironic gestures; they were also seductive, energetic, alive in a way that a lot of late modernist painting had stopped being. Peter Halley once said his paintings were about “the geometricization of modern life,” but they were also about how that geometricization could be weirdly beautiful, even if it was suffocating. The movement embraced contradiction: it was critical of consumerism but also attracted to its visual language, skeptical of abstraction’s claims to purity but still invested in making compelling abstract images. I guess it makes sense that Neo Geo burned out pretty quickly—by the early ’90s, the art world had moved on to other things, and the artists themselves went in different directions. But the questions it raised about how we seperate art from commerce, or whether we even should, haven’t really gone away.
The Fluorescent Afterlife of Shapes That Wanted to Be Billboards
Turns out, Neo Geo’s influence didn’t vanish when the movement did.
You can see its fingerprints all over contemporary art that plays with branding, digital aesthetics, and the slick surfaces of consumer culture. Artists working today—people making work about Instagram, about crypto, about the visual overload of late capitalism—are often dealing with the same tensions Neo Geo wrestled with: how do you make art that’s both inside and outside the commercial image economy? The movement’s use of industrial materials, synthetic colors, and geometric clarity prefigured a lot of what we now associate with post-internet art, even if the technologies involved are totally different. And honestly, walking through a museum show of Neo Geo work now feels strangely prescient—those Day-Glo grids and commodity-fetish sculptures look less like relics of the ’80s and more like prophecies of our current moment, where every image is an ad and every ad is trying to look like art. It’s a little depressing, maybe, but also kind of thrilling to see how a movement that lasted barely a decade managed to capture something so enduring about the way we live now: surrounded by shapes, colors, and surfaces that are always trying to sell us something, even when they’re hanging in a gallery and defying easy categorization.
