Untitled (Standing Man and Woman) 1938

This painting of a standing man and woman was made by Mark Rothko, and what hits you first is that this picture plane feels almost claustrophobic. The surface seems worked, reworked. You can see the struggle and labour of the artist in the palimpsest of marks left on the canvas. There is a real build-up of paint in certain areas – it’s almost like he was wrestling with the figures. There’s the ochre of the man’s suit, the curious mauve of the background… I can imagine Rothko thinking ‘how can I make these figures alive?’ It's a question every painter asks themselves. Maybe he looked to the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, who twisted his figures into psychological knots. Rothko definitely takes note of the emotional potential of those heavy lines to convey a kind of interior unease. Painting is always about exchange. We keep this conversation going. We can never really know, but we can look.