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Robert Motherwell
Two Figures No. 7

1958

About the Item

Robert Motherwell Two Figures No.7 1958 Oil on paperboard mounted on board 18.9 x 23.9 cms (7 7/16 x 9 7/16 ins) RM14236 W36 Motherwell painted this work in Saint-Jean-de-Luz during the summer of 1958. Small oil sketches embodying the Two Figures theme are widely exuberant exercises in expressionist brush gesture, but the sense of dominant organic images involved in a wild dance persists. These never become overall Abstract Expressionist patterns. They are figures set within a stage of controlled area. "The sense of figuration is always implicit in Elegies and in many other works executed after 1958. The two figures can be associated with his wife and himself, and even though they are presented as black shapes, the predominance of whites ... lends to the conception an air of both lightness and gravity that reflects his mood".
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