Around 1951, the Hungarian born Schöffer made circa 6 Spatiodynamic reliefs. Some of them are illustrated in the

exhibition catalogue of the Schöffer show in 2016 in the Kunsthalle, Budapest, and in Jean Cassou, Guy Habasque and

Jacques Ménétrier’s book about Nicolas Schoffer from 1963.

Habasque writes (p.10); “It was in 1948 that he really found himself. After a few years of exploration (..) he became convinced that art could not limit itself to depicting moods or combining free forms, and came to the conclusion that the most important plastic values were space – the raw material of sculpture- and dynamism. The essential conquest of our technical civilisation.

Associating these in the meaningful designation “spatiodynamism”, he set out to develop them in sculpture to the maximum.

Instead of circumscribing or suggesting portions of space - hollow volumes, so to speak, like those of Pevsner and Gabo,

who before him had already confirmed the value of the active void - Schöffer rejected large continuous surfaces and had

recoursed to a preliminary skeleton or frame as basic element which delimited and marked out the space that he wished

encompass at the same time that it determined the general rhythm of the work.

This primacy of the skeleton was and remains essential, for, executed as it is in slender iron bars, it does not block the view,

and the sculpture thus becomes, according the artist’s own terms, ”airy, transparent and penetrable”.

Formerly in the collection of Nelly van Doesburg, this elegant early Spatiodynamic relief is one of the few works with nonmoving elements.

Nanette Rothschild recalled (Marcus 1996, p. 73) how they, during a visit to Nelly van Doesburg in Meudon in 1955, bought a 1921 Mondrian Compostion with Red, Yellow and Blue together with this small early construction from Nicolas Schöffer, then a young man whom Van Doesburg was helping to establish his practice.