Signs 1967

Adolph Gottlieb made this piece, called Signs, with paint, aiming for something primal and immediate. There’s a cool contrast here between that bright yellow ground and the graphic black marks, like looking at a deconstructed road sign. You get the sense Gottlieb was interested in the act of painting itself. It's a bold statement, all about surface and gesture. Look at the drippy edges, the varied thickness of the marks, how the light bounces off the pigment. Those confident brushstrokes make me think of Franz Kline, but maybe with a dash of Joan Miró's playfulness. Like the Abstract Expressionists, he’s searching for a kind of raw emotion. It feels like a conversation with the past, filtered through a modern sensibility. What is he trying to tell us? Maybe that's up to us to decide.