May 1955 (Carved Forms and Indigo)

Description / Expertise

Ben Nicholson shared with his father William a fascination for the still-life genre, taking inspiration from simple arrangements of glass, silver and ceramic objects. In his paintings Nicholson used these objects as the starting point for the depiction of forms in space, extracting from them their essence as design elements. This composition is typical of his still lifes of the mid-fifties with its overlapping forms and pencil drawn lines.
The construction of these paintings is a development from his work of the mid-thirties in which Nicholson allowed the forms of earlier paintings to penetrate later reworkings.