Opus 168 1966

Editor: Here we have Hans Hinterreiter’s "Opus 168" from 1966, an acrylic-on-who-knows-what jewel. I'm immediately struck by the colours - how these blues and purples fight for attention within the arch, like staring up into a complex, almost dizzying dome. What do you make of its playful abstraction? Curator: Playful is spot-on. It winks, doesn't it? Hinterreiter had a thing for mathematical systems, believed they could birth visual harmony. Imagine him as a kind of coding artist long before computers were doing *this*. Do you feel that "harmony," or does the organised chaos win out? I wonder, does this dome feels stable or ready to topple over into a pile of geometric confetti? Editor: Confetti's a great way to put it. There's a tension, like it *should* feel stable, with that grounding brown outline, but it really doesn't. So the structure's failing. And do the pointy stars or triangles read like active shards, destabilizing the picture frame? Curator: Shards is wonderfully sharp phrasing; maybe Hinterreiter wants to fracture perspective, poke holes in how we typically expect form and colour to behave. A rebel using geometry. And that brown edge...does it fail to contain, like an ill-fitting frame barely hanging on, or does its colour merely flatten all into one decorative flourish? Do you like that edge detail? Editor: It’s growing on me... it's a little unexpected and stops it all getting too floaty, gives it some weight. Looking closely, though, all the shapes overlap - transparent planes almost. It changes how you read the whole. Curator: Transparency adds layers, both literal and interpretive. Now, it feels more like gazing through coloured glass, seeing how mathematics and imagination can unexpectedly dance together. See, you went from 'dizzying dome' to unlocking how its layers move around the picture plane! Editor: Definitely. This whole piece moved! And it makes the colours and geometric shapes become vibrant in motion and thought, really intriguing to observe from this angle.