Red-Blue Structure

Zdeněk Sýkora Red-Blue Structure  is an example of the artist’s well-known series of computer-aided “structures,” developed in collaboration with mathematician Jaroslav Blažek. It is also notable as Sýkora’s first serigraph.

Sýkora’s primary medium was painting. After early periods of experimentation with Surrealism and Cubism, he had turned to landscape painting before discovering the language of geometric abstraction in the late 1950s. In the early 1960s, he hit upon the idea of using combinatorial principles from mathematics to organize the geometric elements of his paintings, which he called “structures.” He began working with Blažek, a friend, to create a computer program that could generate compositions for him.

From 1964, Sýkora used the computer (an LGP-30) to compose his structures, made up of half-circles in two contrasting colors—in this case, red and blue—arranged in a square grid. He would then paint the compositions on canvas, and sometimes produced prints such as this serigraph, which was published in a run of 100 by Edition H in Hanover.

What was then a highly novel concept quickly attracted international attention. But it was also met with skepticism. “People object that my work method does not seem very creative to them if I complete something that has already been set out in advance (even though it was done by me),” he said in a 1991 interview. “But bringing it to fruition is another great experience: it is comparable to writing a score and performing a piece of music.”

Sýkora continued to work on the structures until 1972–73, when he moved on to a new series focused on randomly arranged lines.