The period Rojo spent in New York, where she pursued further studies in painting and printmaking from 1985 to 1987 with the aid of a grant from the March foundation, was crucial to the development of her painterly idiom, influenced by artists like Barnett Newman (1905-1970) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). She adopted Rothko’s way of working in flat planes of colour with almost liquid paint, which becomes a glaze, and using the traces left by the drips from the brush as formal elements.

Gizeh I is a work of exquisite elegance which conveys light and warmth with a palette of yellows and golden ochres. The subject is viewed through a haze, evoking the dazzling brightness of the Egyptian desert.

Rojo always works on the boundary between the abstract and the figurative. In 1992 she travelled all over Egypt, taking a series of notes and photographs which were to provide the raw material for later paintings. She did a series of four pictures of the Gizeh Pyramid, of which this is the first. The final result is a weightless, timeless, eternal work.