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8 June 1963 (lilac blue), 1963 Signed, dated and titled verso 'Ben Nicholson, June 1963, (lilac-blue)' Oil and pencil on canvas, mounted on the artist's board 30 1/2 x 28 3/8 in, 77.5 x 72 cm Provenance The artist, Ticino Waddington Galleries, London (no. B10129) Galerie Loper, Zurich (no. GLK5321) Painted at the apogée of his career, this exquisitely painted canvas shows Nicholson engaging in dialogues with contemporary art movements across mainland Europe, including Minimalism and the work of the German artist group ZERO. Prefiguring his painted hardboard reliefs of the late 1960s and 1970s, this composition shows Nicholson redefining painting within the Modernist context. In July 1958 Nicholson settled near Lake Maggiore in Switzerland. Close to the Italian border and defined by its picturesque charm, Nicholson found the new location "stimulating" and "entirely magical with the kind of poetry which I would like to find in my painting". Like Mondrian, whom he had worked alongside during the 1930s, Nicholson's preoccupation with abstraction was centred in the forms and rhythms of the natural world; he began to respond to the landscape in broad terms of space, mass and light. Much like Feb 1960 (ice-off-blue) which belongs to the Tate collection, Nicholson has used translucent colouring and overlapping planes to evoke shifting blocks of ice, inspired by the glaciers of the surrounding mountains. June 1963 (lilac blue) also shows Nicholson assimilating Minimalist ideology into his practice. Compositions such as this can be compared, in particular, with the work of ZERO Group's Otto Piene, Günther Uecker and Heinz Mack whose new visual language centred on the ideals of purity, newness and light. Filled with brightness, the evocative canvas indicates Nicholson's ambition to "liberate light", whilst he has achieved an aesthetic purity with the pared-down, repetitive and geometric forms. This composition clearly reveals Nicholson exploring the interplay between abstraction and representation as he developed "a powerful, unlimited and universal language".