拍品專文
In Serge Poliakoff's Composition abstraite (1953), interlocking shapes of earthly hues combine, reflecting a dynamic interplay of geometry and color. Towards the center of the painting are passages of warm orange, golden yellow, and indigo pigment. These segments are slight variations of the three primary colors, their seemingly spontaneous juxtaposition producing contrasts that balance the withdrawn quality of the earthly hues. The clean edges of the shapes, curvilinear or straight, provide transitions that draw the eye to the lively encounters between form and color as well as the painting’s overall organization.
A key member of the School of Paris, Poliakoff fled his country during the 1917 Russian Revolution, first for Bulgaria and eventually for the French capital. In Paris, he took classes with Othon Friesz, a former Fauve painter whose interest in saturated color, may have influenced the young artist. His friendship with Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and later Wassily Kandinsky, in the 1930s confirmed his interest in color, and allowed his works to develop into a more mature style of lyrical abstraction in the 1950s.
Poliakoff’s paintings explore the expressive qualities of geometric line, form, and color. Lines establish clarity and composition, while colors describe, interiorize and loosen things up. The resulting dynamic invites the viewer to become aware of the interactions between paint and its supporting surface. The pushing and pulling forces create minor tensions in the pictorial field, as patterns of partiality, discontinuity and fragmentation serve as formal points of access to the artist’s abstract language.
The artist saw the event of modern art as a vehicle of expression of his own time. He sought to integrate art history to bridge the temporal interval between the earlier works and their new abstract interpretations. His admiration for Giotto, Paul Gauguin and Otto Freundlich led him to form a renewed relationship with the basic elements of composition. In this painting, the elimination of the distinction between foreground and background can be seen as a reconfiguration of the past geometric model. The flatness of the shapes, their interactions highlighted by the shifting colors, function as pictorial memories that carry the ancient and the modern in the temporal moment of the present.
A key member of the School of Paris, Poliakoff fled his country during the 1917 Russian Revolution, first for Bulgaria and eventually for the French capital. In Paris, he took classes with Othon Friesz, a former Fauve painter whose interest in saturated color, may have influenced the young artist. His friendship with Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and later Wassily Kandinsky, in the 1930s confirmed his interest in color, and allowed his works to develop into a more mature style of lyrical abstraction in the 1950s.
Poliakoff’s paintings explore the expressive qualities of geometric line, form, and color. Lines establish clarity and composition, while colors describe, interiorize and loosen things up. The resulting dynamic invites the viewer to become aware of the interactions between paint and its supporting surface. The pushing and pulling forces create minor tensions in the pictorial field, as patterns of partiality, discontinuity and fragmentation serve as formal points of access to the artist’s abstract language.
The artist saw the event of modern art as a vehicle of expression of his own time. He sought to integrate art history to bridge the temporal interval between the earlier works and their new abstract interpretations. His admiration for Giotto, Paul Gauguin and Otto Freundlich led him to form a renewed relationship with the basic elements of composition. In this painting, the elimination of the distinction between foreground and background can be seen as a reconfiguration of the past geometric model. The flatness of the shapes, their interactions highlighted by the shifting colors, function as pictorial memories that carry the ancient and the modern in the temporal moment of the present.