Three Triangles Red, Orange

Terry Haass

Furthering her exploration of the themes of space and time, as she had done in the early 1960s after finding inspiration in Albert Einstein’s theories on relativity, Terry Haass uses the outlines of basic shapes, shot through with saturated texture and color, and suspends them in the “space” of the sheet. The effect is galactic in nature, encompassing the violence and beauty of energy and matter found throughout the universe, captured in small format within the simple mathematical boundaries of familiar geometry. The storms on Jupiter’s surface, the ring of Saturn, the pocked face of the moon: these patterns appear throughout her intaglios of the 1960s and ‘70s, and they remain a major landmark of her body of work.

Haass created an informal series of these shape studies in coordination with Circle Fine Arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, leaving them untitled save for the descriptor in their catalog.