­In the early 1950s Jasper Johns (born 1930 in Augusta, Georgia, raised in Allendale, South Carolina, lives in New York) came to New York where he met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. This generation of artists was concerned with a new understanding of art and its purposes in contrast to the emotionally charged works of Abstract Expressionism. Influenced by and in continuation of the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, these artists, musicians and dancers involved objects, materials and practices in their artistic work which were based on a reflection and perception of everyday life and an understanding for non-restricted artistic expressions as a starting point for their individual formal languages.

Jasper Johns became famous for his paintings, sculptures and prints representing popular icons and pictorial images such as flags, letters or numbers, which were influential for the Pop Art movement at the beginning of the 1960s. He transferred these images into his paintings where they became not only the depicted motif but the object-like painting itself.

Emphasizing a textural, thick quality of paint, Jasper John’s works concentrated on linearity, repetition, and symmetry as much as on the purity of colors. These aspects are not only predominant in his earlier works of the 1950s and 1960s, but also in his later paintings, drawings and prints up to the beginning of the 1980s as represented in the Untitled paint stick on vellum work in The UBS Art Collection.

Like a linear network of grid-like patterns, each altering and using elementary colors, such as yellow, red, blue and sometimes green or grey, the composition is painted like an abstract all-over triptych, where the center is dominated by the dynamically intersected grids of yellow, while the left section is dominated by red and the right part appears to be dominated by blue. The work is a typical example of Jasper John’s works from the 1970s and early 1980s, where the dynamically striped grids of pure colors are organized in the painting as a network reminiscent of the enlarged surface of a woven tapestry. At the same time they draw attention to elementary and inherent considerations concerning the medium of painting, such as composition, paint and colors, dynamics and the space within a picture.

In his works since the early 1980s, Jasper Johns has also turned his interest to contents of a subjective and personal figuration. The UBS Art Collection also includes some of these works by Jasper Johns.