Three Colours Surrounded by Equal Amounts of Black and White 1970

Max Bill's painting is all blocks of sharp colour, pushed together like they're trying to solve a problem, but what problem? I imagine he was aiming for some kind of balance, maybe even perfection, laying down each colour like a carefully considered move in a game. The flat blocks of orange, green and violet, nestled in equal measure between expanses of black and white. It's a bold, confident painting. You can sense him wanting to see how these colours vibrate against one another, each hue impacting the next and bouncing around in a beautiful play of tension. Bill, like many artists, was in conversation with the greats that came before him like Mondrian and the Bauhaus artists; experimenting and pushing the boundaries of what paint can do. It makes you wonder what new languages are still waiting to be discovered in painting.