Lot 96 D

The painter, graphic designer and sculptor Victor Vasarely was one of the initiators of Op-Art and Kinetic Art. Originally inspired by Paul Klee and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, his constructive geometric abstraction is based on a standardised vocabulary of shapes and colours with surprising optical effects. With these means, he evokes immediate sensations and experiences of matter, space and movement in the viewer.
Following artistic experiments with Surrealism, Cubism, various Constructivist tendencies and strongly contrasting works in black and white, Vasarely reverts to colour in the early 1960s and developed the “Plastic Alphabet” as his most significant artistic invention. He uses the square as a basic shape, which he combines with other geometric shapes, including the circle, the ellipse, the rectangle, and the rhombus. With the help of six basic colours and their lighter or darker nuances, these forms are designed in partly flat, partly spatial structures rich in contrast. He calls this basic module a “plastic unit”. Similar to the letters of the alphabet, they offer him seemingly endless combination possibilities. In the late work on offer, “Trid-Bay”, he works in this way with the colours blue, yellow, and olive green, with which he combines the optically confusing cubes, triangles and diamonds that alternately protrude and recede. As the viewer’s eye inevitably searches for an underlying pattern, dynamics and spatial illusions appear on the picture surface.