Lot 105 D

In the late 1940s Serge Poliakoff found his own unmistakable visual idiom in abstraction - preceding not from theoretical concepts but individual, emotional insights. “It must have been a sense of the infinite wealth of forms which led Poliakoff - who was, after all, already 47 years old - to occupy himself entirely without compromise with a simultaneously limited and inexhaustible field of artistic possibilities. We never sense doubts or a search for new shores. The constantly bubbling wellspring of his pictorial inventions demonstrates the great capacity of his conception. His works neither become frozen in geometric rigour nor do they linger in an analytical constructivism. […] These structural qualities of his painting are directly connected with Poliakoff's great musical talent. The guitarist with three decades of professional experience was, of course, familiar with the musical theory of classical and modern music. […].” (Nils Ohlsen, in: Serge Poliakoff. Retrospektive, exhib. cat. Kunsthalle in Emden/Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung München, Munich 2007, p. 31f.).
The “Composition abstraite” here is done in the earthy tones that characterise most of his early abstract works. In contrast to the emphatically two-dimensional visual idiom that dominated his oeuvre from the 1950s onwards, here free and gestural contours define the composition, which seems to extend in depth. White, yellow and dark brown lines as well as tonally similar planes overlap and intersect into a web concentrated towards the centre of the picture.