1959 January

In the 1950s, Heron's paintings were consistently evolving and January 1959 succeeded the loosely structured 'garden' pictures of 1956 and the horizontal and vertical bands of colour which characterised the 'stripe' or 'horizon' pictures of 1956-57. From this period Heron moved away from references to the visual world and was more concerned with the formal qualities of a painting: the asymmetry of shape, relationship of colour tones and paint application. His titles ceased to refer to landscape but rather to colours, shapes or as in the present work, the year and month of execution. 'My interest is in fact always in space and colour and space and colour is the subject of my painting today to the exclusion of everything else' (see M. Gooding, Patrick Heron, London, 1994, p. 145).

Heron had his first exhibition in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1960.