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Two young women are sitting on a terrace in front of a house. With their lowered heads, they look serious, preoccupied – a mood which seems in sharp contrast to the cheerful red sarong with its white floral decoration and the blue and yellow wrap. But not only are the clothes rendered in brilliant colours, so are the terrace floor and the green grass in the background. Gauguin’s choice of colours, at least, reflects his supposedly South Seas paradise, his dream of a different world.

When Paul Gauguin took the boat to Tahiti in April 1891, he had high hopes of making a new home on this Pacific island. Here, he dreamt of a better life among happy and – as was thought at that time – ‘natural’ people, carefree and untouched by the constraints of life in Europe. But even soon after he arrived, reality brought him back down to earth. Disillusioned, Gauguin saw how strongly French colonialism had influenced the life of the Tahitians. Far from being a pristine paradise, it was already home to modern civilisation with all its seamy sides and drawbacks. Is that why he painted these two Tahitian women looking so pensive and sad?

Gauguin employs a flat and consciously decorative painting style. As curator Heike Biedermann explains:

“Gauguin turns his back on the principles of impressionism, on the principles of painting plein air. Instead, he seeks to express what he wants to say just through the colours themselves and their density – and naturally that density goes hand in hand with a certain abstraction.”

Gaugin applies powerful colours – and together with flat shapes and clear contour lines, they become the fundamental element in his compositions. With the strong contrasts of yellow and blue as well as red and green, he significantly intensifies the painting’s luminosity and impact.