Abstract Red paintings

Abstract Painting, Red is amongst the single tone color canvases that Ad Reinhardt began making in the early 1950s—highly structured allover compositions of purple, blue, or black colored. It really is a diptych of two square canvases, all of which is composed of nine smaller squares of varied tones of purple that form a cruciform form. As one square abuts another of a slightly various value or saturation, the connection between negative and positive space becomes ambiguous, and also the area generally seems to fluctuate between projection and recession, concreteness and immateriality. If Abstract Painting, Red and Reinhardt’s other monochrome works of the same duration can probably be said to be “about” any such thing, it is themselves—their color, shape, and balance. The insistent, geometric self-referentiality of those works not merely appears as an essential counter-narrative into the gesturalism of then-dominant Abstract Expressionist painting, but it also anticipates the drastically reductive top-notch the black colored paintings that Reinhardt would start the following 12 months.