George Ortman is an American artist whose abstract constructions explore the borderline between painting and sculpture. He started his career as an Abstract Expressionist painter but moved on to more hard-edge, geometic abstraction. He came to critical attention in the late 1950s and 1960s for his canvases covered with shapes such as crosses, squares, rectangles or circles, cut from another canvas and dipped in pigment. In other works, flat compositions were made up from plaster, wood and other materials, or sometimes part of the composition would be derived from negative space - with areas cut away.

Working with the essentially flat surface of print on paper in this piece, Ortman suggests his interest in exploring the crossover between ambiguity and reality and between depth and surface, in overlaying geometric patterns, combined with physical ‘cut outs’ in the sheet.