Jean Gorin
Composition Nº 28
Date 1930
Medium Oil on wood
Dimensions 70.5 x 70.5 cm
Inventory ID UID 102-227
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One of the Jean Gorin’s first reliefs. The white and grey form a single plane, the red is recessed and the black is in relief. While Piet Mondrian had tilted his works, in lozenges, since 1918, Gorin only started to used the technique in 1925, in his Composition avec translation de plans [Composition with translated planes], in which he attempted to make the stable and closed square the focus of a rotational movement. He applied the same principle, the following year, in Composition n˚5 (1926, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris) and Composition n˚10, dated the same year. In this work, the reduced number of planes of colour and lines which cross each other echo Mondrian’s works of the same period. Gorin plays with this principle, balancing the composition in the difference in thickness of the principal lines. Yet the use of a grey plane which is not delimited, at the bottom right, was, in theory, rejected by neoplasticism. Perhaps its use reveals the influence of Theo van Doesburg’s ‘counter-proposals’. This work is significantly more economical than Composition n˚4, of the same year, in which Gorin plays with two vertical and three horizontal sections, and three planes of colour. Gorin would return to the lozenge format in spatio-temporal compositions during the 1970s. The frame is unquestionably part of the work, and the measurements refer to its dimensions (the work itself measures 54.7 cm across). AC
Momentum Fine Arts, Minneapolis; Galerie Denise René, Paris.