Lot 331 D

Oil on canvas 100 x 81 cm, framed. Signed 'SErgE PoLiAKoFF' lower right. - With a short, retouched scratch in the upper margin as well as on the immediate left edge of the stretcher at the top with 2 minor retouched losses of colour. With partial early-stage shrinkage cracks in the pastose areas.

With an expertise by Alexis Poliakoff, Paris, dated 19 October 2010. The painting is registered in the Serge Poliakoff Archive under the no. 967187.

Provenance
Redfern Gallery, London, 1969 (label on reverse of stretcher); Galerie Ernst Beyeler, Basel (label on reverse of stretcher); private collection, Italy

Exhibition
Basel 1970 (Galerie Beyeler), Moon and Space, cat. no. 64, with full-page colour illus. p. 27 (here titled and dated "composition rouge, bleue et verte 1966")

As an artist Serge Poliakoff always remained solitary. His oeuvre cannot be associated with the expressive or the informel tendencies of his contemporaries. In the course of a slow and deliberate working process, and in each of his compositions, he developed the desired harmony between forms and colours by means of their careful counterbalancing . His goal was to arrive at a state of absolute "stillness": "In order to be a painter, you have to seek precisely that point where art, science and chemistry meet ... If you can do that, there will be total stillness in your pictures: not merely the absence of sound, but a positive tranquility that opens peoples' eyes to another world" (Serge Poliakoff, quoted in: Serge Poliakoff: Retrospektive, exh. cat. Kunsthalle in Emden/Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung München, Munich 2006, p. 66).
Since the early 1950s Poliakoff had been working with a purely abstract, geometrical vocabulary in which variously coloured forms are placed in direct contact with one another, under the exclusion of all linear elements. His distinctive repertoire of relatively expansive forms enabled Poliakoff to create highly diverse variations in ever new constellations; his canon of colours displays an inexhaustible richness in its mixing and layering of relatively few basic colours. Once he had developed it, the artist continued to pursue this compositional concept with great rigour and passion until his death - without ever falling into stagnation or repetition.
Our composition was created in 1967 and features formations of shapes in two manifestations of a distinct character; these are typical of Poliakoff's oeuvre and repeatedly appear in it: On the one hand there are the block-like, opaque planes of green and red that function as a stable framework in the foreground of the image. On the other hand the passages of light and dark blue display a vigorous, painterly structure and are light and semi-transparent in appearance. Like a stained-glass window, they seem as though they were illuminated by a light source behind them. In comparison with the opaque planes, they optically recede into the background of the image, and this leads to the development - in spite of all the monumental calmness emanating from the composition - of an exciting, dynamic interaction.