Zero — Bauhaus-Blocked Cartoon Sphynx, Museum Forecourt, Dessau

There is a certain kind of museum that will only accept a cartoon if the cartoon has an argument behind it. This commission came with the argument attached, and the argument was good.

The proposition

The museum wanted a piece for its forecourt that would stand as a colour study in the tradition of the building, while still being something a child would run towards. Their suggestion, which we kept: use an animal with no fur and no pattern of its own, so that the colour is entirely ours. A sphynx.

Dividing a cat into geometry

The rule was that the body would be divided by hard painted edges into circles, squares and triangles, in red, yellow, blue, black and grey, with no gradients and no soft transitions anywhere. Applying that rule to an animal means deciding where the joints are.

We let the school of the building make the decisions. The head is a blue circle. The chest is a yellow square rotated forty-five degrees. The hips are red. The ears are two triangles, one black and one grey, and the tail is a thin grey line that completes the composition. Every edge is a hard transition — the colour simply stops and another one starts.

The ears had to grow to carry their triangles. A sphynx ear is already large; ours is close to a third of the head height, which pushes the piece past naturalism and into the cartoon in one move.

Why satin and not gloss

Full gloss on strong primary colours produces a wet, almost confectionery look that would have worked against the geometry. The satin coat keeps the painted planes reading as flat colour under the museum’s north light, which is the condition the forecourt actually lives in.

In the forecourt

It stands off to the side of the main approach rather than on the axis, which was the museum’s decision and the correct one: you arrive, you notice it, and you walk over to it as a choice. Their education team now runs a colour workshop that starts in front of it.