Tugo Šušnik is part the generation of painters who followed the new trends in Western, and especially American, painting in the 1970s. Spending his childhood and youth in London and New York, he then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, but still maintained contacts with both art metropolises, which greatly influenced his creative output. His experience of living in these two great artistic centers and his in-depth knowledge of their trends make him one of the foremost figures of Slovenian modernism and postmodernism.

Šušnik’s oeuvre can be divided into several creative periods during which he investigated various questions related to art theory. Untitled is an early work, done soon after his graduation from the Academy in 1974. At the time he was inspired by American abstract painting, in particular abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction. Related to this in Slovenian art is the so-called fundamental painting, which focuses on exploring the medium of painting itself, with color, texture, format, and composition playing crucial roles. Characteristic of Šušnik’s works of that period were large, rectangular canvases that show the artist engaging with the work with his whole body, the predominant use of grayscale, and the absence of a story, also indicated by the neutrality of the titles.

In his subsequent artistic progression Šušnik gradually introduced more colors, abandoned the traditional rectangular format, and in the 1980s and 1990s began to experiment with various materials. An example of this transition is the painting next to this one, entitled The Tower of Babel. There, the most noticeable new elements are the dynamic form of the canvas: before painting on it, the artist plastically shaped it with fabric and wood, giving it a relief surface that reaches out into the space.