CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/12/2022

A new monograph on Sonia Delaunay releases this week!

Last week marked the end of the wonderful Sonia Delaunay survey at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. It was truly difficult to choose an image to reproduce here, we love them all so much. Nevertheless, in honor of the show’s closing, we are pleased to feature the 1925 oil painting, Robes simultanées (Trois femmes, formes, couleurs), which shows Delaunay's skills as a painter and a designer. “The Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay (1885 1979) worked across media, art forms and cultural spheres, merging art and design and pushing abstract art far beyond the frame of painting,” Tine Colstrup writes. “Encompassing multiple projects at once, her art unfolded over 60 years, from the 1910s to the 1970s. Color—in particular, dynamic color interaction—is at the heart of her work. In painting and other disciplines, Sonia Delaunay cultivated nonfigurative compositions in which colors did not have to color anything, as in figurative pictures, but work instead by their own power through dynamic, evocative contrasts. Colors affect each other when seen side by side. With cultivation of such simultaneous color contrasts as the jumping-off point, the term simultaneity became the ultimate key to her work. The concept embraces the vibrant dynamism of the modern world and an artistic position simultaneously engaged in multiple areas.” Colstrup continues, “As an artist, Sonia Delaunay herself is thoroughly simultaneous, moving freely in and out of isms and roles.”