The free-flowing pigments and calligraphic lines layered across the surface of Red Rythms typify Mark Tobey’s mature style and signature approach to painting. The built-up surfaces create an atmospheric condition of depth; an otherwise flat picture plan appears to recede far past the limits of rational space. Despite its appearance, Tobey’s work never became entirely abstract and remained inextricably rooted in the world. Tobey often referred to his layered works as microcosms of the universe. Harnessing creative traditions of the East and West, the intimate scale and calligraphic mark making recall an ancient writing tablet, a cross-cultural archetype. Additionally, Tobey’s work inherently questions the nationalistic programs of total abstraction that dominated art of the 1940s and 1950s in New York. While a younger generation of American painters in New York chased larger scale and all-over abstraction, Tobey continued undeterred, creating carefully articulated, rich compositions in a diminutive scale.

Red Rhythms was previously in the collection of pioneering art dealer Marian Willard, who opened her first New York gallery, East River Gallery in 1936 before opening her eponymous gallery in 1940. Willard championed Mark Tobey’s vision of work that invokes the universal and the transcendent.