Composition – Image, 1962

Alekos Kontopoulos was in the vanguard of abstract painting in Greece. By the early 1950s he’d begun organizing the still figurative elements of his compositions in a geometric fashion under the influence of Cubism and geometric abstraction. Characteristic of this first period is the juxtaposition of abstract and figurative elements in the same composition. In Composition-Image, the abstraction has been culminated. Two masses of color, one dark, the other red, clash on a ground covered in shades of ochre and sienna. Beams of light cross the space, while dynamic orbital brushstrokes introduce their own rhythm to this composition that recalls the French Informel, the trend of amorphous art that concurrently dominated the art scene in France, where Kontopoulos lived for many years.