Komposition; Zellen c. 1923

Karl Wiener made ‘Komposition; Zellen’ with coloured pencil, we don't know exactly when, but sometime before 1949. It looks like a little world being built up on the page. There's a real sense of process. I get the feeling he wasn't aiming for perfection, but exploring what the pencils could do. The texture is something else. You can see the grain of the paper coming through those marks. See how the colors build up in layers, especially in that orange blob? It’s not flat, it’s got depth. It’s like he’s carving out space with color. It feels really physical to me, like he’s right there, pressing the pencil down, making these marks with his own hand. It is all contained within this very fine box of a drawn line. This reminds me of Paul Klee, another artist who let his imagination run wild on paper. Both artists remind us that art isn’t always about having all the answers, it’s about the questions we ask along the way.