Antigone c. 1941

Mark Rothko made ‘Antigone’ with oil on canvas, and the cool thing about it is how Rothko’s clearly figuring things out as he goes. You can see the thinking in the making. The way the paint is applied here, it's scrubbed and layered, transparent in places, but opaque in others. There’s a real physicality to it; the surface feels like a record of Rothko’s process. Look at the head on the right, it's like a ghostly afterthought, barely there, but still present. It's a little detail, but it speaks volumes about the painting’s overall feeling of searching. This kind of work reminds me of Picasso, that willingness to reinvent the figure, to break it down and rebuild it in paint. Rothko is always questioning, always pushing. Art’s just an ongoing conversation anyway, right? And this painting’s a pretty interesting contribution, full of beautiful ambiguity.