Provenance: Galerie Nordenhake, Malmö, Sweden.

“I’m not interested in painting pictures of things. I don’t think of my paintings as pictures - I think of them as 'not-pictures', as objects. I want my paintings to be very special kinds of objects that take their place in the world of objects, that engage and actually reach out and touch the viewer". Throughout his career, Thornton Willis has studied the relationship between the abstract painting and the physical world. In his work, geometry often melds with intuition, which he himself described as “Biomorphic Cubism”. During his art studies at the University of Alabama in the 1960s, Willis, through his teacher Melville Price, discovered abstract expressionism, which had a lasting influence on his art, and he considers himself as part of “The Third Generation of Abstract Expressionism”. In 1967, he became a teacher at Wagner College on Staten Island and settled in New York. Today, he is regarded as one of the most prominent abstract painters of his generation with his works on display in places such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Whitney Museum of American Art. In the 1970s, Willis began a new series of zig-zag patterns and sail-like triangles, which he called 'wedges'. He developed these further by letting two fields of different colours overlap with a prism effect. He is especially interested in how the corners and edges of the different colour fields meet each other: ”Edges are very important in my work. They can be exciting places where things happen, like where the ocean meets the land and there’s lots of activity as animals scurry back and forth”. One of his main works in the so-called “Wedge” series is the present piece from 1982, entitled “Summer Suite”. The painting was part of Thornton Willis' individual exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake in Sweden, where it was acquired by the present owner.