378/63 1963

Rupprecht Geiger made this untitled painting, 378/63, at some point in his career, probably with acrylic on canvas. The colours are flat, bold, but not aggressive, and you can see how he was pushing colour combinations, working with the idea of colour as the subject. The pink hovers over the orange like a thought. The texture is smooth, almost like it's been sprayed, but you can still sense a hand in it, a careful building up of layers, like maybe the artist was trying to capture a certain feeling, or a fleeting moment. The bottom section, the orange, feels like it's glowing, giving off heat. It’s not trying to be anything else but itself. You see the same confidence in Josef Albers’ work with his Homage to the Square series, where the focus is entirely on colour relationships and how they affect our perception. What is colour but an ongoing experiment?