Untitled 1945

This Untitled work was made by Mark Rothko, but at what point in his career, who knows! The way he approaches mark-making here is, shall we say, not polite. It's like he's wrestling with the canvas. The painting has this tactile quality; you can almost feel the push and pull of the brushstrokes. The paint isn't just applied, it's coaxed, dragged, and layered. Look at that pinkish form in the centre – it's like a ghost of a shape, barely there, but still demanding attention. And those scribbles and lines! They’re like thoughts or afterthoughts, fleeting and uncertain. Rothko really lets the medium do its thing, embracing the mess and the ambiguity. It reminds me a little of the earlier work of de Kooning, before he became so hung up on these ideas of gesture. It's all about process, about the act of painting as a way of figuring things out. And maybe, just maybe, a way of figuring ourselves out too.