Laszlo Moholy Nagy. Composition Z IV 1923

Laszlo Moholy Nagy. Composition Z IV 1923

Painted in 1923, Z IV demonstrates the artist’s characteristic innovative boldness, establishing a wonderful dialogue between the black diagonal bar and the abstract ray of light interspersed with vertical black lines and three colored dots. Moholy-Nagy was convinced that current art must be part of contemporary reality in order to convey meaning to its audience, which was in the grip of new technological advances. He therefore considered traditional figurative painting obsolete and turned to pure geometric abstraction, influenced by Russian constructivists such as Malevich and El Lissitsky. In this work, Moholy-Nagy explores a way of representing light on the painted canvas: the colored circles appear translucent when one plane is superimposed on the next, their hues changing accordingly. These intersecting, transparent forms read like converging beams of light.