Koller View 4/21

5 Preview of the PostWar & Contemporary Art auction on 2 December 2021 The interplay between intent and chance 2 3 use computers to program his paintings. At the same time, he allowed chance to flow into his work, coun- terbalancing the purely mathematical with subjective interventions. Sýkora’s line paintings gained worldwide recognition from 1973 onwards. The two works in our December auction, ‘Linien Nr. 12’ from 1981 (ill. 6) and ‘Linie Nr. 93’ from1992 (ill. 1), resemble a tangle of col- ourful streamers. The sinuous bands of colour, cut at the edges of the canvas and partly overlapping, em- phasise the cropped nature of the motifs and are as generic as they are individual. A comparable interplay of intent and chance un- derlies Kenneth Martin’s painting ‘Chance. Order. Change II’ (ill. 2). It is based on the use of simple, re- petitive forms and on the observation of mathemat- ical progression and rules of proportion. The charac- teristically coloured grid that unites the works in this series is based on a meticulously planned measur- © 2021, ProLitteris, Zurich Abstraction in Modern Art began in the early years of the20 th century, for exam- ple in the late paintings of Hilma af Klint, as well as in works by František Kupka and Wassily Kandinsky. Somewhat later, Piet Mondrian and the Swiss artist So- phie Taeuber-Arp also made forays into abstraction. By the early 1950s various currents of non-representational art had become well-established, primarily in Europe and the USA. Zdeněk Sýkora is one of the most im- portant representatives of the group of Czech post-war modernists who focused on abstract-constructivist painting. In the 1960s he attempted to combine science with art, working with mathematicians and physicists to