I just learned that "Madder" is the name of a color. Enough learning cor tonight lol.
Berenice Sydney is a fascinatingly overlooked figure. She was born in London in 1944 and died at only 39, but left behind an unusually large body of paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture. She exhibited internationally during her lifetime, including at the ICA in London.
What is especially interesting about works like Green Sun (1968) is that Sydney repeatedly returned to circles, spirals, radiating lines and movement. Dance was important to her, and these recurring structures often grew from ideas of bodies moving through space rather than from purely geometric abstraction.
For these color studies, that makes the palette especially good to pull apart. The painting is built from a surprisingly tight vocabulary of hot reds and oranges against blue, purple, green and near-black, repeated across those radiating forms until color itself becomes part of the movement.