Untitled 1969

This untitled painting by Mark Rothko, a big sheet of colour, invites us into a world of pure sensation and contemplation. Rothko’s paintings are about the experience of painting, the materiality of colour and how it affects us. Look closely and you will see how the surface of the paper is built up with layers of thin, transparent washes. The reds and oranges vibrate against each other, creating a shimmering effect. There’s a blurry line in the middle where the two colour fields meet, it’s not precise, and that gives the whole thing an ethereal quality. It’s like Rothko is trying to capture something fleeting, something that can’t quite be grasped. Rothko was part of a generation who took painting into new, uncharted territories. Think of Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin and others. They had a profound understanding of how to make paintings which embrace ambiguity and multiple interpretations over fixed or definitive meanings.