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Construction serves as a starting point not only for "Green Donkey" painted in Lepzig, but for his previous pictures, too. In the case of this picture, he enters space and creates a peculiar ideal space. Satiric tone is an equal partner in forming space. There is a couple in the middle of the perspective leading to endless depth. Transcendental light, full moon and a couple: he collected all romantic props. He played a trick on sentimentality and constructivism devoid of content with his ironic humour: there is a green donkey, as if a sculpture, on a Doric column.
The picture represents a version of "Composition in Space" (1915). The plane which was floating there became smaller and partly slipped out of the picture and the vertical plane became thicker as if a wall. The prism on the left which was undivided turned into a Bauhaus-building of several units, in fact the way space is formed, shows the influence of Bauhaus principles of architecture and stage. If you are looking for analogies, you can find them in the works of Italian metaphysical painters. The same way as De Chirico arrived at his new "world of reality" carefully constructed in the middle of the 1910s, Bortnyik created well-balanced space irrealistic in his ironic neo-classical work of solid composition which is on the whole irrealistic. Bortnyik came to dislike the chaos of the last few decades, both artistic and social. He was in search of a new order and a new type of man.
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