Untitled (Abstraction with Red Circles) 1965

William Wegman made this untitled print with graphic shapes and bold colors sometime in 1965. Just look at those red circles floating in the hazy blue! I bet Wegman was thinking about color and form, how they push and pull against each other on the page. The blue rectangles give the red circles a home, but the rough textures suggest something less stable. There's a tension between control and chaos, like he’s trying to wrangle these shapes into some kind of order, but the materials are having none of it. I wonder if he was also looking at other artists who worked with grids and abstraction, like Agnes Martin, who had a very different take on similar shapes. Artists are always talking to each other across time, you know, riffing on each other’s ideas, adding their own spin. Wegman’s print reminds me that painting is an ongoing conversation, and abstraction is one way of making that conversation visible.