Frustration (1945) is a very early work from the beginning of Grace Hartigan’s career, built from interlocking biomorphic forms in saturated yellows, greens and purples, with heavy black contours. The work is signed “Jachens”, Hartigan’s married name at the time, placing it within a particularly formative moment in both her personal and artistic life. Painted in the same year that Hartigan moved to New York and began entering the city’s downtown artistic circle, where she encountered artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, the work predates the fully developed gestural abstraction for which she became known. The biomorphic forms, bold black contouring, flattened picture space, non-naturalistic colour and energetic handling of paint already point towards key characteristics of her mature practice, including her sustained negotiation between abstraction and figuration and her incorporation of recognisable, bodily forms into abstract compositions.