Gelmeroda VIII 1921

Lyonel Feininger painted Gelmeroda VIII with oil on canvas, but it feels like light itself is the medium. Look at how he’s built up the composition with these translucent, geometric shapes, almost like stained glass. The blues and grays create a sense of depth, but the surface remains so flat. It’s like he's trying to capture the feeling of a memory, something seen but not quite tangible. See that little cluster of figures down at the bottom? They're so small in comparison to the architecture, which makes the building seem monumental, eternal even. But the way Feininger fractures the image, it never quite resolves itself, it's always in flux. Feininger’s work reminds me a little of Agnes Martin, in the way he pursues a kind of spiritual abstraction, but with a totally different set of tools. It's like he’s not trying to represent the world, but instead trying to catch something more elusive, something in between the seen and unseen.