The AGO’s stunning summer show features work from the world’s greatest modern artists. Here are stories behind 5 of its most important works

Here are five canvases of particular note.

Mark Rothko, No. 1, White and Red, 1962

The best and most important work in the show, this painting — which has been in storage for years — is reason enough to see the exhibition. 

Rothko’s paintings are distinguished by their simple forms. In “No. 1, White and Red,” three coloured squares — white, red and brown — are stacked on top of one another over a black backdrop. That’s a fair description of how the painting looks, but it’s impossible to capture in words, or photos, the expressive intensity of Rothko’s colours and how they make you feel.

Born in Latvia in 1903, Rothko moved as a child to America, where he later became a leader in colour field painting. These painters used colour to express emotion and typically worked on massive canvases: this painting is 8.5 x 7.5 feet. 

It’s also a showcase of Rothko’s evolving palette; he began incorporating darker colours later in his career. It’s been widely speculated that this turn was related to the artist’s depression, which eventually led to his suicide in 1970. But these biographical readings are reductive and ultimately meaningless.

You would do better spending a full 10 minutes in front of “No. 1, White and Red.” Consider what emotions the colours conjure. See how staring at it affects your perception. Notice how the light plays off the canvas, and how moving around it changes the way the colours interact.

Agnes Martin, The Rose, 1964

“The Rose” exemplifies Agnes Martin’s skilful minimalism, and is one of the best examples of her influential grid paintings. On small canvases, Martin drew hundreds of horizontal and vertical lines that met to make infinitesimal rectangles. Her muted colour palette and aversion to lyricism made her a pioneering figure in Minimalist art.

Martin was born in Saskatchewan but moved to the U.S. to pursue teaching. In New York, she associated with abstract artists and immersed herself in Buddhist and Zen teachings.

But Martin’s work is not academic, nor is she necessarily ascetic. Get close to “The Rose” and you’ll notice a faint pulsing of light red in its lower half. Martin found playfulness and beauty in the simplicity of a flat canvas.

Gerhard Richter, Helga Matura, 1966

Gerhard Richter, who is 92, has a claim to being the most influential living artist. He was born in Dresden in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power, and most of his work reckons with Nazism and the Holocaust. His work is often conceptual, and concerned with questions about art’s relationship to memory, biography and ethics.

After the war, Richter and his family lived in East Germany, where he studied painting. Upon seeing an exhibition of Jackson Pollock paintings, he moved to the less culturally repressive West Germany. He brought an album of family photos, which he used to create a series of murky, black-and-white paintings. 

Richter’s work in the 1960s approaches realism, but his signature blurring techniques imbue these images with a haziness that approximates the process of remembering. His choice of subject matter, such as a mentally ill aunt who was killed during the war, gives these paintings both personal and national resonance. 

The subject of “Helga Matura, 1966,” is a Frankfurt prostitute, who was murdered the year the painting was made. She looks at the camera, smiling mischievously, her skin a phosphorescent white. Richter renders her as both being and spirit, a presence and an absence. 

Tomie Ohtake, Opus 3, 1973

Tomie Ohtake started painting when she was 39, and first received recognition when she was in her fifties. (She was born in Japan but moved to Brazil during World War II.) After a period of figuration, Ohtake began making colour field paintings. As part of her process, Ohtake created collages from ripped-up Brazilian and Japanese magazines. According to one curator, this process allowed Ohtake to infuse “the entire painting process with both chance and control.”

This is on display in “Opus 3,” with its precise contrasting of sky-blues, crimsons and bright oranges, and Ohtake’s expert use of inorganic, rounded rectangle shapes. Together, they create a geometric dynamism.

Alex Colville, Woman in Bathtub, 1973

One of Canada’s greatest artists, Alex Colville took a modernist approach to figurative painting. He was born in Toronto but grew up in Nova Scotia. After fighting in World War II, Colville began teaching at Mount Allison University, where he mentored a generation of Canadian artists.

Colville is a modernist painter because of his rigorous approach to composition, which he used to distort perception and heighten the psychological drama of his paintings.

Colville paints “Woman in Bathtub” from a strange low angle and in proximity: it’s as if the viewer’s chin is resting on the rim of the tub, which continues out of the frame. By exaggerating the tub’s size, Colville turns it into a massive porcelain container for his subject, who sits in it, her face downturned. His expressionistic use of spatial depth makes his subject’s vulnerability clear.

Outside the tub, behind the subject, a figure in a robe lurks. Colville adds to the sense of depth by contrasting the subject’s blond hair and the dark blue robe he wears, increasing the starkness of their separation. The robed figure is made menacing because we do not see his face, only his hands — one of which bears a ring. 

Colville has isolated an ambiguous and intricate domestic moment, adding to its psychological complexity by manipulating composition and colour.