A restrained work on paper built from stacked bands of colour that reads as both experiment and resolution. The title we have given it is honest: it has the feel of a colour study, an artist testing how tones sit against each other, and yet it holds together as a finished picture in a way most studies never manage.

That tension is the appeal. Anonymous works get judged harshly, valued as decor rather than as art, but the hand here is far stronger than the auction estimate suggested. The banded structure puts it loosely in the colour-field conversation that ran through the middle of the century, where the subject of a painting became colour itself and the relationships between fields of it. On estate provenance and the original frame, it appears to date from around 1970 to 1980. Reframed by KOBK in Australian hardwood, otherwise left alone.