Arches in Navy & Gold

About this work

Stacked arches in deep navy and warm orange, each traced with fine gold lines, hold a gold-leaf sun and a smaller golden moon. On both sides, shimmering gold leaf frames the composition. The result is strong and graphic, and the whole piece reads like a modernist gate you could walk through.

The arch is one of the oldest forms in architecture, and the Bauhaus and its circle liked to reduce such forms to their geometric essence: a semicircle on a rectangle, a circle for a sun. Josef Albers, who taught at the school, later spent years painting nested squares to study how colours affect one another, and the same idea of stacked, repeated shapes is at work here. Arches in Navy & Gold is a reimagining in the Bauhaus spirit, not a copy of any original, with gold leaf adding warmth to the strict geometry.

It suits a living room with blue tones, a bedroom or an entrance that needs one bold piece. Navy, warm white, sand or terracotta walls bring out its colours, and brass hardware echoes the gold edges. As a set, it joins The Golden Sun and The Golden Grid in Bauhaus in Gold, between a golden sun on cream and a grid in black and brick red. The file prints sharply to about 76 cm on the long edge at 300 dpi.