Alexander Calder
Silver Bed Head, special commission for Peggy Guggenheim’s New York apartment
1946

Agnes Martin
Untitled
1961

Henri Laurens
Femme à L'Oiseau
1922

“By falling asleep, I fall inside myself: from my exhaustion, from my boredom, from my exhausted pleasure or from my exhausting pain. I fall inside my own satiety as well as my own vacuity: I myself become the abyss and the plunge, the density of deep water and the descent of the drowned body sinking backward. I fall to where I am no longer separated from the world by a demarcation that still belongs to me all through my waking state and that I myself am, just as I am my skin and all my sense organs. I pass that line of distinction, I slip entire into the innermost and outermost part of myself, erasing the division between these two putative regions.”

— Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. by Charlotte Mandell

Robert Mapplethorpe
Flower Arrangement
1986

Norman McLaren
A Phantasy in Colors
1949

wretched thou art wherever thou art
          I sit and work on a line and lean into the pain my mind               continues           trying to think and all I come up with is a texture without               ideas
and to whatever thou turnest —
          the body I have is the body I once had but they could not               differ more           the teacher Agnes says abstract form holds meaning               beyond words
   I turn the pages of the old book
          the way certain feelings come to us with no discernible               worldly cause             the teacher Buddha says the practitioner agitated by               thoughts
 
I have not held since childhood
 
          makes stronger their bondage to suffering and the sting               of becoming           during the time illness makes me feel most tied to the               material world

— Brian Teare, an excerpt from When we are on the right track we are rewarded with joy

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Alexander Calder
Sans titre
1964

Sheila Metzner
Mouille Shapes
1986

John Zabawa
Water Stones
2018

Man Ray
Louisa Calder Wearing a Necklace Made by Alexander Calder
Paris, 1931

Arthur Luiz Piza
Untitled
1980