NO.14 is an oil on canvas, inspired by the artwork with the same title by the Russian-American artist Mark Rothko. The distinctive approach to painting that Rothko undertook during his life is today deeply associated with big institutions, such as MOMA, which has a fair share of his work. Despite his abstract oeuvre, the painter’s beliefs were strongly related to the content of his works, and not only the formal aspect, as it was defended by critics of his time. After seeing Fra Angelico’s paintings, Rothko was both inspired and troubled; he wanted to create works that communicated complex human emotions, especially tragedy. NO. 14 is an excellent example of the restricted means employed by the painter, making forces of attraction and repulsion through his color fields.

The painter was from a family of immigrants who fled from their country afraid from the beginning of the 1st World War. Rothko had an outstanding education since he was young. After a brief amount of time after arriving in the US, he gained a scholarship to study at Yale. Rothko, who since then was tied to worker’s associations, found the Yale students vapid and uninspiring. He dropped out of the institution, moving to New York. There, he became a student in The New School for Design. He met Arshile Gorky, who became a kind of mentor to the American Abstract Expressionists and a great inspiration for Rothko himself. He also had classes with Max Weber, a Cubist, which left his influence in the painter’s early works.

Rothko became acquainted with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. At the time, the circle of painters emerged around Milton Avery, whose emphasis on the formal aspects of art and the embodiment of European influences were a fundamental inspiration for the emerging abstract painters. Part of the group formed The Ten, and defended creative freedom, and was against regionalist trends. Soon enough, Rothko had solo shows - he was never fond of exhibiting collectively - and from the early Surreal and even Social Realist works, which were already heavily stylized, his unique oeuvre started to form. Rothko played with many aspects of the figure, even incorporating mythological subjects, but by the influence of Clyfford Still, he settled on color field painting.

NO.14 is an oil on canvas. The picture was painted in a gestural way, which gives a tactile factor to the artist’s artworks. From the end of the 1940s until his death, the painter’s oeuvre seemed to go in the direction of restriction: forms became less abundant. In this case, there is an intense black background on which both the upper and bottom square rest. The different fields create different aesthetic sensations, the orange being a warm color while blue is a cold one. In this restricted visual dynamic, the color fields in real life give an idea of absorption, an almost magnetic force.