Influenced by meeting Sonia and Robert Delaunay as much as by Wassily Kandinsky, Serge Poliakoff combined curves and right angles in his paintings. He did not identify with “pure” geometry, nor with lyrical, gestural or informal abstraction, which was tending to impose itself in the latter half of the 1940s. Avoiding obvious forms, often asymmetrical, his paintings seek above all the vibration of matter and colour, without depth or perspective. For Poliakoff, shapes and colours exist within themselves, by themselves and for themselves.