Poliakoff, Serge

After the Russian Revolution, the Russian-born Serge Poliakoff, who is among the most important representatives of the “École de Paris”, succeeded in reaching Paris along a circuitous route; in 1929 he began his education as an artist at Paris’s Académie de la Grande Chaumière. By the end of 1931 he had already taken part in his first group exhibition. Initially still unable to break free of figurative painting, he progressed on to abstraction in the late 1930s – through his acquaintance with Kandinsky and with Robert and Sonia Delaunay – and he then gradually developed his own individual form of expression. Beginning in the early 1950s, he used a purely abstract, geometric vocabulary in which forms of different colours were placed directly adjacent to one another in the absence of any linear elements. He varied this distinctive repertoire of forms in highly diverse ways in order to continuously form new constellations; through the mixing and superimposing of a relatively small number of base colours, his chromatic canon displays an inexhaustible richness. Once he had developed his compositional concept, the artist would continue to pursue it until his death – without it ever leading to stagnation or repetition.