Ilya Bolotowsky had a legendary career that involved painting, sculpture, mural production, as well as teaching and also filmmaking. He was an idealist who constantly embraced new trends in search for order and balance in response to his tumultous upbringing in Russia. Bolotowsky was a socially progressive thinker who devoted his life to enriching the abstract tradition. He found that the geometric discipline of the cerebreal Neoplasticism exemplified by Piet Mondrian was a way to express his desire for a dynamic equilibrium. His geometric abstractions of the 1950s achieved a sophisticated balance of linear spatial divisions and striking color tonalities. In a review of his 1974 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, which traveled to Washington D.C.'s National Gallery, his work was singled out at scarcely human, commanding a design sense of such power and flexibility.
