Alakzat IV (Formation IV)

Imre Bak, one of the foremost artists of the postwar generation in Hungary, mines the Constructivist tradition as it developed in the USSR and Europe, likewise the tradition of hard-edge abstract painting in the US after World War II. Alakzat IV (Formation IV) belongs to a series of abstract, geometric, eccentrically shaped paintings from the late 1960s. Unlike American artists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, whose shaped canvases use deductive compositions, Bak builds his shaped paintings part by part, like a collage, from separate pieces of wood: eight elongated ovals that alternate from bright white to bright blue and two zig-zag shapes in black. The ovals surround a void at the center. The color contrasts act in tandem with the dynamism of the composition to create an especially electric form of illusionism and spatiality. Ultimately, Alakzat IV (Formation IV) is as much object or structure as it is painting, a distinction many artists of the period were testing.