Untitled

Christo Coetzee challenged artistic conventions of figuration and abstraction in his work through a process he called “destruction through reconstruction.” The artist considered relief, volume, and texture integral parts of Untitled’s, composition, building up layers of paint and fixing objects to the canvas. This radical spatial technique was also used by Coetzee’s peers in Europe, such as Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana. Coetzee made this work during his stay in Paris, and it is an example of his assemblage paintings that signify a departure from his focus on representation in the early 1950s. Made from organic materials and through processes of reconstruction, many of Coetzee’s paintings during this period deal with metaphysical and existential notions of death, rebirth, and transcendence.