Irene Rice Pereira was an abstract artist known for experimental combinations of Bauhaus principles, cosmological philosophy, and mysticism. With her career rooted firmly in New York—where she was active in the Greenwich Village bohemian scene before studying at the Art Students League from 1927–30, and later, teaching at the WPA school known as the Design Laboratory beginning in 1935—Pereira played a major role in bringing new European ideas of abstraction to the United States. At the Design Laboratory, she taught a curriculum largely influenced by the Bauhaus School, founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in post-World War I Weimer, Germany. Taking forward the Bauhaus’s approach to modernism marked by reductive forms and geometries in her own work, Peirera subscribed to the movement’s belief that non-objective abstraction served a greater purpose in society linked to technology and design.

Importantly, the artist equally sought meaning in abstraction beyond the material realm, in works like Formal Arrangement (1947). A gouache composed of regular perpendiculars met by shifting diagonals, polygons, and otherwise skewed lines, the painting exemplifies the signature linearity of Pereira’s dynamic geometric rhythms—moments of overlap, interruption, asymmetry—that she saw as an articulation of nature’s essence and the spirit of being. As she articulated: 

One employs the abstract as a means of understanding nature more profoundly, and more sincerely; incorporating its movements, its functions, and its relations into an intellectual comprehension, a more sensitized emotion, manifested through the instrument of a more distilled consciousness. Of course, using the abstract always as a basis upon which to build structures, harmonies, rhythms, relationships, etc., and as a means of reaching the very core, the essence, the interpretation of things, the artist is then capable of bridling the music of nature as a medium for creating and composing. 

Though Pereira adopted the Bauhaus ideal that an artist’s vision could be in harmony with the evolving industrial landscape of mass production, her work was also informed by such esoteric considerations of consciousness and harmony itself where abstraction becomes a meditation on patterns of existence in the wider universe, beyond the chaotic modern world, in which everything is intrinsically linked.

Formal Arrangement engages these beliefs as its clean order collides with more inscrutable and layered rectilinear shapes, structure, and materiality. Often experimenting with industrial plastics, such as vellum and glass as a surface, this painting is distinctively marked by incisions of white lines, calling to the physicality of the universe and, presciently, to the objectness of painting. In its lyrical yet measured design, the work articulates different energies and music-like patterns, focusing less on color than the work’s rectilinear components: what might have been a formal, legible grid dispersing into discrete vectors and lines, cohering and falling apart, beyond immediate legibility, like the abstract forces of the cosmos.