About the work

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 eye around the entire canvas, subverting formal traditions of composition and perspective.

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. Tapié was 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 in an aluminum frame with welded and polished corners of the type popularized by New York frame Richard Kulicke behind 99% UV-blocking Plexiglas using strictly conservation-grade materials. The work is 30 x 35 inches in a frame that is 32.75 x 37.75 inches.