The Inner Space, 1970

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York The J L Hudson Gallery, Detroit Private Collection, Ontario

Cotter, Holland. The New York Times, December 15, 2000, p. E41. Seitz, William C. The Responsive Eye. Catalogue of an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York [in collaboration with the City Art Museum of St. Louis, the Contemporary Art Council of the Seattle Art Museum, the Pasadena Art Museum, and the Baltimore Museum of Art]. Museum of Modern Art: New York, 1965.

As critics and the artist alike have often noted, the optical effects of colour are the most striking and luminous aspects of Richard Anuskiewicz’s meticulously crafted compositions. “Colour function becomes my subject matter,” he has said about his experimental practice, “and its performance is my painting.” A leading American figure of the Op art movement, Anuszkiewicz has long been recognized for the hypnotic geometry of his compositions, his impeccable Hard-edge technique, and the evocative shimmer of his juxtapositions of saturated colour. Reflecting on Anuszkiewicz's practice in 2000, the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter described the artist’s formidable appeal, writing, "The drama—and that feels like the right word—is in the subtle chemistry of complementary colors, which makes the geometry glow as if light were leaking out from behind it." Painted at the height of his career, in the year following the artist’s major solo exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in 1969, “The Inner Space” is an investigation of the effects of formal colour and structural phenomena on human perception. With its nested rectangular forms, the painting expresses a preoccupation with optics shared by Anuszkiewicz’s mentor Josef Albers. A master of conceptual abstraction and design theory, the famed colourist’s instruction had a lasting impact on the younger artist’s practice. In his well-known series “Homage to the Square”, Albers experimented with juxtapositions of solid colour; here, however, Anuszkiewicz develops these concepts further, exploring the optical changes that occur when different high-intensity colours—blue, green, magenta, and red—are applied to the same meticulous geometric configurations. As field and foreground dissolve, the dynamic effect of the searing colours is mesmerizing.