Important Winter Sale presents Victor Vasarely

Bukowskis presents ”Nill" by Victor Vasarely at this season's largest live auction – Important Winter Sale.

Vasarely worked as a graphic designer in Paris during the 1930s, and it was then that he began systematically exploring the optical and emotional reach of various graphic techniques. While supporting himself and his young family, Vasarely developed his own form of geometric abstraction, endlessly varying it to create different optical patterns with kinetic effects. His early work Zebra from 1937 is considered one of the earliest examples of Op Art.

The idea for the painting “Nill”, included in this auction, was conceived or emerged in 1962. Colour had begun to return to his work after the artist’s black-and-white period (1954–1960). Vasarely had studied the laws of visual perception and Gestalt theory in depth, and he applied these scientific insights in his art. The viewer of “Nill” will subconsciously attempt to interpret the relative positions of the forms in the painting. It is in the nature of the human brain to try to simplify and organise objects into some kind of system. In a complex composition, the forms are divided into foreground (figure) and background (ground). The effect is one of virtual movement: figures appear to rise through the painting’s visual plane to occupy the foreground.

Vasarely’s exploration of perception and Gestalt theory had its starting point in an early memory of tiled surfaces at a Paris metro station in the 1930s. This experience provided an impulse to which Vasarely returned throughout his life. “Nill” was painted in 1987, when the artist was 81 years old, following a similar motif in “Linn-3” a few years earlier.

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