Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem |
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Jackson Pollock
American, 1912-1956 Horizontal Composition ca. 1949 Oil and enamel on canvas mounted on composition board 25.4 x 309.6 cm Gift of Sylvia and Joseph Slifka, New York, to American Friends of the Israel Museum © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Accession number: B03.0826 |
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Jackson Pollock, a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism, is best known for his "drip" or "action" paintings of 1947-1951. To produce these works, Pollock spread large canvases on the floor of his barn studio and used brushes, sticks, and even turkey-basters to pour, fling, and drip the paint onto the surface. This technique, which evolved from Surrealist automatic drawing, results in a borderless composition of interpenetrating lines; a space in which there is no differentation between top and bottom, inside and out.
Horizontal Composition, an extremely elongated painting, apparently cut from a larger composition, seems to extend into infinite space. Three colors are poured onto a rust-colored background, forming a finely entangled web. Blue and black swirls interwine and bleed into one another, and are delicately threaded with a white enamel overlay. The careful distribution of light and dark conveys a sense of depth and vitality. |
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