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Untitled Blue-Green Small Composition on Paper

Martha McKay

Framed size: 14.75 in. (h) x 16.25 in. (w) x 1.5 in. (d)

$950.00

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Collage, Drawing

About the work

A beautiful composition of color, light, and texture, by a mid-Twentieth Century master.

This painting reflects McKay’s full embrace of the allover abstraction techniques of her expressionist contemporaries. But her frenetic, calligraphic strokes draw the viewer’s attention to the entire image, subverting formal traditions of composition and perspective. This is particularly true of McKay’s small works, where the eye can capture the entire work with one look.

This work shows the influence of the avant-garde Japanese “Gutai” art group with which McKay was associated in the 1960s under the tutelage of her mentor, the French art critic Michel Tapié, a major supporter of the group.

The Gutai Group was an experimental group in which its members explored the relationship between spirit, human body, and material, and is now one of the most internationally-recognized Japanese art movements. By choosing the Japanese term “gutai” (which means concrete, as opposed to abstract or figurative), the group distinguished themselves from contemporary figurative art, such as the surrealists and social realists, as well as from the developing formalist geometric abstraction. In the “Gutai Art Manifesto”, the founder of the group, the painter Jirō Yoshihara, stated that Gutai Art aspired “to go beyond abstraction” and “to pursue . . . the possibilities of pure creativity,” rejecting conventions and the limits of genres. Individual artists who were active in the Gutai group included John Cage, Paul Jenkins, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Rauschenberg.

This work has been custom-framed using strictly conservation-grade materials in a black-stained Ash frame behind 99% UV-blocking art glass. The sheet is 4.875 in. (h) x 7 in. (w). The image on the sheet is 4.125 in. (h) x 6.125 in. (w). The window to the image is 4.0 in. (h) x 6.0 in. (w). The frame is 14.75 in. (h) x 16.25 in. (w).