The modernist dictates of Good Design meant that chairs, graphics and table settings tended toward formal abstraction.

The other comes from description, and provides information about the properties of particular languages as formal abstractions and as actualized in use.

Eventually they grow frustrated and, as the shrill sound of Shostakovich gives way to spirited drumming, their stiff formal abstractions take on spry, demonstrative quality.

Although they were close to eight hundred years old, they looked modern in their formal abstraction.

But all are remarkable for being emotional as well as formal abstractions.

Though they can appear compellingly fragile, figurative puppetry and nonfigurative-object theater are robust media for formal abstraction.

Schlemmer, van Doesburg and Mies were not merely creating formal abstractions.

Yet González's sculptures never become purely formal abstractions.

In the first act of "Strange Attractors," however, the emphasis is on formal abstraction, as two lines of dancers weave through the same space but seldom touch.

Some of this early work, like the well-known "Wall Street," experimented with formal abstractions (influencing, among others, Edward Hopper and his idiosyncratic urban vision).