Gerardo Rueda’s work is anything but cold and analytical. As the artist himself declared, his goal was “to create a painting that is as uncompromising as it is sentient.” In pieces such as this one, the Madrid-born artist focuses on what he believes is truly essential, in other words: form, volume and colour, discarding all superfluous traits.

“I was always interested in things made manually, in experimenting, in looking at things, in playing with materials,” he stated. In the mid-sixties Rueda started to incorporate wood to his pieces, until turning his works into painting reliefs. He usually worked with untreated wood: stretchers, small match boxes or strips of wood, as in the case of Espera V. From this moment onwards, the frames, which the artist also painted, became yet another element in many of works.