Komposition in Weiß

“Composition in White” by Hildegard Joos has three white multi-angled shapes on a white background. Around the unpainted edges you can see the black felt on which the composition is painted. Look more closely, and you will see that this felt is visible at other places too and that it contributes to the structure of the work. Take a look at the geometrical shapes. They are not outlined to make them stand out from each other or the background, and there is no variation in color—no gray or another white. The only difference is that the paint is applied more thickly, and that it thus covers the black felt more or less thoroughly. These monotone “cell pictures,” as Joos called them, were painted in Paris, where the artist had a studio from the late 1950s. Here Joos discovered abstract painting, after previously working with figurative and expressive forms and sometimes with religious and spiritual contents. In the late 1950s, Joos turned her attention to strictly geometrical and constructivist formal idioms, developed in dialogue with her husband, the philosopher Harold Joos. Her works range from monochrome painting to Op Art, grid and chessboard pictures, and what she called „narrative geometrisms,“ in which monochrome painting and pictograms were combined. Hildegard Joos is seen as one of the most important Austrian representatives of geometrical abstraction. In 1954 she became a member of the Vienna Secession, where in 1958 she became the first woman to present a large solo exhibition.