Serge Poliakoff was one of the pivotal members of the ‘New’ Ecole de Paris that drove the rise of lyrical abstraction in Europe after the Second World War. Alongside Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Georges Mathieu, Poliakoff was celebrated for his poetic approach to colour and daring exploration of form that contrasted with the severity of geometric abstraction. This unique style of ‘colour-form’ painting was particularly inspired by Poliakoff’s meeting with Wassily Kandinsky and the contemporary patchworks of harmonious or contrasting colour by Sonia and Robert Delaunay.

In the 1960s Poliakoff began to limit his palette to just a few tonal notes that gave his work a delicate sense of depth and three-dimensionality. Poliakoff described the control of palette saying, “If you let it your colour will take charge of you…A child will use all the colours in the box at once, instinctively, and you don’t want to make that same mistake”.

In this remarkable painting – ‘Composition abstraite’ - from 1967, Poliakoff reduces his composition to vibrant interlocking shapes of red, yellow and black that seem to slide together in tranquil harmony. Poliakoff was particularly interested in this careful balance between form and colour, relishing the singular moment when all aspects of a work of art are entirely resolved, which he termed “le silence complet”. Poliakoff described this moment saying, “when a painting is silent it means it is successful. Some of my paintings begin with turmoil. They are explosive. But I am satisfied only when they become silent. A form has to be listened to and not be looked at.” In ‘Composition abstraite’ Poliakoff gently alters the relationship between shape and colour to achieve this sense of stillness and calm.

Poliakoff was one of the countless émigrés that fled to Paris from the Russian Revolution in 1917, initially earning his living as a musician in the city’s cabarets while training as an artist at the Académie Forchot, Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Slade School in London. He achieved considerable success during his lifetime with a retrospective of his work at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1963), and displays at Documenta III (1964) and Venice Biennale (1962). Poliakoff’s work can now be found in international collections such as Tate, UK; Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, USA and Museum of Modern Art, USA.