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Polygon in Space
1969
40" x 30"
Painting, oil on canvas
Signed and dated 1969 verso
In "Polygon in Space" (1969), it makes sense that Shaw would reference the era of space travel: the landing on the moon of Apollo 11 took place in July of the year. In the work, he conveys a feeling of the emptiness of open space in the way that the white polygon seems to open a hole into the darkness, which a black space capsule is entering.

Spanierman Gallery, LLC
New York, NY

About the Artist
Charles Green Shaw
(1892 - 1974)
During his successful painting career, which spanned four decades of modernism, Charles Green Shaw skillfully explored several abstract idioms. A native New Yorker, Shaw’s early work was in writing; in the 1920s he contributed to publications including the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. During travels to Europe from 1929 to 1932, he gained first-hand experience with new developments in modern art, and began to devote himself to painting. By 1940, Shaw had developed the idea of the “plastic polygon,” a pictorial structure based on simplified architectonic and organic shapes combined with a Cubist grid. Shaw worked with variants of this concept in painting and in wood relief constructions. With the exception of a few depictions of simplified, angular figures in the late 1940s, Shaw’s work remained essentially nonrepresentational for the rest of his career.

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