RBFB Tower

Eric Sall created this soaring, abstract painting in response to the vertical lobby space and overall monumentality of the Richard Bolling Federal Building.  The painting’s dynamic arrangements of forms and colors are the result of Sall’s intuitive process.  He painted layer after layer of overlapping imagery across three large canvases until arriving at this final composition, which only partially reveals the history of its making.  For example, the black-and-white plant forms that are partially visible toward the bottom of the painting once covered all three panels. Over a span of several months, Sall obscured most of his earlier work with various geometric shapes and free-form passages of colorful brushwork.  The result is a sumptuous lexicon of improvisational mark-making that rewards close examination.

Although Sall’s paintings are non-representational, they often include snippets of imagery observed from life that catch the artist’s eye, such as interestingly textured objects, geometric structures, and patterned surfaces.  For instance, the ribbon of white stripes that cuts through part of RBFB Tower could allude to the shade fins that run along the south façade of the Bolling Building, the lanes of a highway, the rows of a field, or any number of associations.  Sall has said: “I like art not only when it dazzles your senses, but also when it makes you think about things.”