Helen Pashgian’s Untitled (1968/69), dates from the early development of the Light and Space movement in Southern California in the late 1960s. Trained as an art historian with a focus on the Dutch Golden Age, Pashgian was particularly interested in the ways artists such as Vermeer used light to animate and transform the visible world. In her own practice, she moved beyond the representation of light to make light itself the subject of the work, a central concern of the emerging Light and Space movement.

Pashgian was also fascinated by the abstract qualities of natural phenomena in her native California, particularly sunlight moving across water, reflections and the shifting depths of California’s tide pools. Rather than depicting these phenomena directly, she distilled their visual effects into abstract forms, reflecting the experience of the landscape in which she was working.