Pedestal Table in front of the Window 1921

Juan Gris made this painting, ‘Pedestal Table in front of the Window,’ with oils on canvas, but there’s no date for the work. I like how he's piecing together these familiar shapes - the guitar, the bottle, the buildings outside the window - it’s like he’s thinking about how we see, and how we make sense of the world through fragments. Check out the texture on the guitar. See how Gris uses these smooth, flat planes to build form, but then adds these slightly textured areas to give it depth? It's like he's reminding us that this is a painting, a made thing, not just a representation of reality. I keep thinking about how the colour palette here feels both earthy and luminous, somehow. Think about how the buildings outside the window mirror the still life on the table. The outside comes inside and the inside goes outside; this is such a reminder that artmaking is an ongoing exchange of ideas across time, and like a conversation, meaning is layered, never fixed.