Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981) - Tondo

Ilya Bolotowsky: Tondo (1978)

Colour silkscreen on Fabriano wove paper, hand-printed in ten to twelve passes and published by Edition Partanen, Schluchsee (Germany) in 1978. The sheet carries the Fabriano embossed mark ("50% COTTON") in the lower left corner, visible in the detail photographs.
An elliptical field of deep ultramarine is divided by a vertical black band and crossed by a single yellow horizontal, with a thin red vertical set against black at the lower right as the sole counterweight. The composition is contained entirely within the oval — the rectangular sheet is left as open white margin, so the ellipse reads as an autonomous body rather than a cropped detail. This is Bolotowsky's late vocabulary: the orthogonal grid inherited from Mondrian, but released from the rectangle into the tondo and diamond formats he had developed since the 1960s, where horizontal and vertical must hold their balance against a curved edge.

Edition of 100. This impression numbered in pencil, hand-signed in pencil by the artist in the lower margin.

Sheet 70 × 50 cm. In very good condition throughout — kept in an archival folder since publication, never framed or exposed. Colours are fresh and fully saturated, margins clean, no fading, foxing or handling marks.
Provenance: Edition Partanen, Schluchsee (Germany).

Ilya Bolotowsky (1907–1981) was born in Saint Petersburg, left Russia with his family after the Revolution and emigrated to New York in 1923, where he trained at the National Academy of Design. He was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 and produced one of the first entirely abstract murals commissioned under the WPA Federal Art Project. After the war he taught at Black Mountain College, succeeding Josef Albers, and later at Southampton College and the University of Wyoming. Bolotowsky was among the artists who carried Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism into American painting, widening its palette and, from the 1960s, moving it out of the rectangle into circular and diamond-shaped formats. His work is held in the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Edition Partanen was founded in 1972 by Tuula Niemeyer-Partanen in Schluchsee in the Black Forest, with a showroom in Zurich, and specialised in silkscreen editions and portfolios by constructive and concrete artists from Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland and the United States.
Year: 1978

Technique: Colour silkscreen (serigraph) on Fabriano paper
Edition: 100
Signature: Hand-signed and numbered in pencil, lower margin
Dimensions: Sheet 70 × 50 cm
Condition: Very good — archivally stored, unframed
Provenance: Edition Partanen, Schluchsee (Germany)