Accession Code: wu0998 Title: Planetariche Folklore Date completed: 1964 Classification: Prints Medium: Screenprint Height (mm): Width (mm): Depth (mm): Inscription: Location Name: Senate House Location Description: Wellbeing Support Services Location Floor: 1

© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021

At the end of the 1950s, a decade during which he had work almost exclusively in black and white, Vasarely introduced vibrant colour into his work inventing formal systems to guide the creation of two themed series of paintings. The first of these, his 'Alphabet Plastique', was based on circles, squares and triangles, and colours organised into scales of twenty hues. The second system was 'Planetary Folklore' which also used combinations of geometric shapes in 'units' on a grid. Each unit has a foreground and a background, this enabled him to have an almost infinite range of permutations of shape and colour combinations. In addition to a major series of paintings, this system was also used for many editions of screenprints as represented here.