Composition A XI 1923

This is one of László Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Composition’ paintings, he made quite a few, all playing with these kinds of geometric forms, hard edges, and a minimal palette. It's like he’s trying to distill painting down to its barest bones, to see what happens when you just have planes and lines floating in space. What’s interesting to me is how the colors interact; that big black rectangle feels so solid and imposing, but then you have these translucent greys that almost disappear into the white background. Look at the bottom left – there's this tiny little cross with a slash of red that feels almost like an afterthought, but it kinda anchors the whole composition. Moholy-Nagy was part of the Bauhaus, and you can see that sensibility in this piece. It’s clean, precise, and almost machine-like. It reminds me of some of El Lissitzky's Proun series, where he's also exploring these utopian, abstract worlds. It's all about possibilities, what painting could be, and how we can see.