Abstract Composition Serge Poliakoff

• Serge Poliakoff is one of the most important representatives of European colour-field painting • ‘Composition abstraite’ is a harmoniously balanced composition from his mature late period • Using the gouache technique, he creates both transparent and dense areas of colour Through his classical, academic early work from 1935 onwards, Serge Poliakoff moved towards abstraction and, in the years that followed, developed a formal language based on pure colour that no longer contained any representational references. Poliakoff drew significant inspiration from Wassily Kandinsky and the artist couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay, as well as the sculptor Otto Freundlich. Despite these prominent role models, Poliakoff soon developed a highly individual and, to this day, entirely distinctive form of abstract painting. In 1945, the Galerie L’Esquisse in Paris hosted Poliakoff’s first purely abstract exhibition. His growing success also had a tangible financial impact in the years that followed, enabling Poliakoff to devote himself exclusively to painting, having previously earned his living as a musician alongside his artistic work. Poliakoff says of his art: ‘One must not forget that every form has two colours: the inner and the outer’. This statement describes the artist’s constant endeavour to explore the relationship between forms and colour, as well as between background and form. In doing so, he repeatedly reduces both the forms and the colours, simplifies them, alters their relative emphasis, and plays with the rhythm and resonance of colour. Initially, Poliakoff’s areas of colour were still within a more subdued colour spectrum; from the 1950s onwards, however, the colour palette lightened considerably. The colour density of the individual forms generally increases towards the centre of the picture; their contours are always slightly curved and blend gently into one another, resulting in barely perceptible vibrations and rhythms within the picture. The balanced proportions of the forms within the pictorial space and the finely harmonious gradation of colours also create, in the 1960 gouache ‘Composition abstraite’—which consists solely of shades of blue mixed with white—a unique, meditative effect that is so characteristic of Poliakoff’s painting. ‘I still remember well how my father (…) took me into the morning stillness of his studio to introduce me to his method of composing a picture. (…) He began by selecting pigments from his deliberately limited colour palette: two shades of blue, two shades of red, one green, one yellow, one black and one white. Using these, he achieved a richness and variety of colour tones through the transparency of the layers painted on top of one another. The ground pigment was carefully mixed with a binder on a glass plate using a painting knife. The resulting paint was then applied without hesitation, yet with precision, to two or three of the forms, so that they could take their place in the composition and echo one another." Alexis Poliakoff (quoted in: WVZ Vol. III, p. 10). | 1900 Moskau - Paris 1969 | Moderne Kunst | Arbeiten auf Papier | Nummer: 26x2314 | Provenance: Galerie Berggruen, Paris; Galerie d’Arte Lorenzelli, Bergamo; Galerie von Vertes; Privatsammlung, Wien (2011); Privatsammlung, Bayern.

Stima:24.000€

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