Hedda Sterne

Born and raised in Bucharest, Hedda Sterne commenced her artistic career in Paris in 1930, where she first worked in the studio of Fernand Léger. She quickly assimilated into the Surrealist circle via her friendship with Victor Brauner, before ultimately fleeing Europe during the Second World War.

Sterne’s artistic perspective transformed once she arrived in New York City in 1943, where she was rapidly integrated into Peggy Guggenheim’s milieu, frequently exhibiting at her gallery Art of This Century. In this enticing environment, at the dawn of Abstract Expressionism, Sterne soon abandoned her former style, describing the United States as “more surrealist, more extraordinary, than anything imagined by the Surrealists.”

Painting first her immediate interior surroundings, Sterne then pivoted her attention to the streets, bridges and elevated highways of New York. In this work, the artist dynamically employs spray paint layered with etched impastos of oil paint to encapsulate the verve and spirit of her adopted home.

Throughout her career, Sterne resisted being confined to a single style, continually experimenting with form and perception. While records of her use of the tondo (round painting) exist from the 1950s, it was in 1967 that Sterne began to embrace the element of chance in her works and began to pour thinned acrylic paint directly onto the raw canvas. Her works exist as embodiments of growth and metamorphosis, approximating the literal depiction of movement and transfiguration.

The circular canvas of Untitled (Tondo) draws the viewer into a world without edges, where vision spirals inward rather than moving across. Sterne connected the tondo to her meditative practice, describing it as “a gathering and inward spiralling… towards a centre distinctly felt.” Here, opalescent veils of color and finely traced lines seem to drift and coil like currents of air, or the contour lines of a shifting landscape. Rather than presenting a fixed viewpoint, the work encourages the eye to wander, evoking a sense of infinity and open-ended exploration.