Diptychs, Triptychs, and Multi-Panelled Works
- Diamond Zhou
- 7 days ago
- 17 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
October 18th, 2025
In Jack Shadbolt’s Dog in an Empty Room, a solitary dog snarls, not from the centre of a single canvas, but a composition made valid across five panels. The room, if one can call it that, is assembled not entirely by walls or floors, but through interruption: floating planes of colour that resembles corners of rooms, symbolic fragments, and jagged gestures arranged in a fractured yet intentional rhythm. The dog is both present and fleeting, it is a spirit caught fire, an emblem, a sound, a memory. Completed in 1977, this work marked the beginning of a shift in Shadbolt’s practice, away from the structured triptychs he had long employed and into a more volatile, expansive spatial logic.
To begin with a Canadian artist is not merely a regionalist gesture. It is to situate our view within a particular tradition of West Coast multiplicity, where nature, memory, and fragmentation are often entangled. Jack Shadbolt’s evolution into multi-panelled painting represents not only a formal expansion but a psychological and philosophical shift, it is a response to his own “horror of the void,” as he once put it. A blank canvas, for Shadbolt, was not a promise but a threat. In the late 1970s, this fear of emptiness became the very catalyst for a body of work that argued against it with expansive and forceful gestures.
Between 1976 and 1981, Shadbolt produced seven large-scale multi-panelled suites, each a kind of visual fugue composed in fragments. The first and most arresting of these was Dog in an Empty Room (1980), a five-panel oil on canvas work that did not begin as a unified composition. According to Scott Watson, the process was incremental and cumulative. It began with a diptych, then a third panel was added, then another, which were not laid out in advance, but accumulated over time. Each stage extended the visual field and shifted its internal mechanism and tensions. The suite grew organically, shaped as much by interruption and pause as by plan. There is no real centre in this work, despite the presence of a snarling, barking dog at the heart of the image.
The dog, which is drawn from Shadbolt’s earlier postwar iconography, was not a neutral motif. It stood for violent, often repressed sexual force, a symbol of instinct, aggression, and unresolved desire. The room, irrational and flattened, vibrates with psychic heat. But perhaps more unsettling than the dog itself is the way the panels resist cohesion. They are not designed to mirror or balance one another. The painting is not a single thought expanded but a series of decisions, collisions, erasures. It is precisely in this discontinuity that the work breathes.
The panels themselves were recycled. Each of the five had once been a finished painting from 1961, which Shadbolt painted over, not to conceal but to engage. The ghost of the earlier work remains, pushing and emerging somewhat against the new surface. The process of re-entering these older canvases allowed him to disrupt his own history and to collapse time within the field of the image. He did not believe in a clean start, because the anxiety of the blank canvas was resolved not through avoidance, but through confrontation with the already-there.
What emerged from this method was a new way of thinking about the panel not as frame or boundary but as pieces and fragments that could and would be utilized. Each panel holds its own intensity, yet it must coexist with others (For many of Shadbolt’s multi-panelled works, he only signed a single panel in the suite to avoid the work being separated and installed or sold as individual works). There is simultaneity but not symmetry. Shadbolt’s move from triptych to suite was not simply a matter of scale. It marked a deeper trust in serial thinking, in compositional risk, and in the instability of image-making itself. The result is a body of work that does not merely fill the void, it haunts it, multiplies it, refracts it, dares the viewer to step inside it and stay a while. They are ultimately meant to be difficult paintings.
The earliest diptychs were not paintings but as hinged writing tablets in ancient Mediterranean. These double-panelled structures were designed to protect their own surfaces, to fold shut. In the Christian era, the format became devotional, they were portable objects used in private prayer. The Wilton Diptych (c. 1395–99), painted for King Richard II of England, shows the king on one panel, kneeling before a celestial Virgin and Child on the other. The hinge becomes a passage between temporal authority and spiritual humility.
As painting moved from the intimate to the monumental, the triptych took hold as the dominant liturgical form. In Robert Campin’s Mérode Altarpiece (c. 1427–32), the Annunciation is situated in a domestic interior, flanked by quiet scenes of the patrons and of Joseph at work. In Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432), the format is both architectural and operatic: twelve panels that open and close to reveal a cosmos of saints, lambs, landscapes, and redemption.
At its most powerful, the sacred triptych operates as a dramatic structure of transformation. The Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16), painted by Matthias Grünewald for a monastic hospital, presents Christ’s crucified body as ravaged and diseased, an image painfully familiar to the ill who worshipped before it. When opened, the panels erupt into resurrection. The work does not just represent salvation. It performs it.
But even in this early history, the triptych could function as mystery rather than doctrine. In The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510), Hieronymus Bosch offers no theological certainty. The left panel shows Eden, the right a tormented Hell, and between them a hallucinatory field of pleasure and chaos. The work unravels salvation for the viewer.
Over time, the triptych format ceased to be sacred structures and became a stage for modern artists. For Max Beckmann and Francis Bacon, the triptych offered not resolution but dissonance, a format that allowed for ambiguity, rupture, and contradiction to coexist without reconciliation. Theirs are not paintings in three acts, but simultaneous rooms of various emotions, each panel resonating at its own volatile frequency.
Max Beckmann, who painted over twenty triptychs in his career, often borrowed the structural grandeur of the altarpiece only to undermine it from within. In Departure (1932–35), arguably his most famous work in this format, the central panel depicts a mythic, almost serene scene of a royal family in a boat, escaping, perhaps, from suffering, while the flanking panels are filled with scenes of brutality, torture, and incarceration. The contrast is uncomfortable, and it is not narrative in any traditional sense. There is no explanatory arc from left to right and no salvation offered in the middle. Instead, Departure stages the fragmentation of hope and despair side by side. The viewer is left to navigate these emotional registers without resolution.
Other Beckmann triptychs, such as The Actors (1941–42) use the format to stage absurdist theatre. Figures appear costumed, masked, distorted. The panels do not mirror one another but seem to converse in strained tones. Beckmann once referred to triptychs as “three windows in a room,” suggesting not sequential vision but the simultaneous co-existence of inner and outer states. Time is fractured and segmented, not linear. Memory and myth bleed into present-tense horror.
Francis Bacon, painting a generation later, reimagined the triptych as a chamber of psychological violence. His Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) takes the triptych out of the church entirely and fills it with writhing, eyeless figures. There is no crucifixion depicted, only its aftermath or prelude. The format once reserved for holy narrative becomes a container for anguish and distortion. Bacon described these works not as sequences but as “simultaneous images,” each one capturing a moment of extreme internal pressure.
In Triptych May–June 1973, painted in response to the suicide of his longtime partner George Dyer, the three panels unfold like a slow scream. Bacon admitted to his friends that he never fully recovered, and this triptych acted as an exorcism of his feelings of loss and guilt. The left panel shows Dyer seated on a toilet, and the right over a sink, shadow spilling from his body in a smear of black. In the central panel, his form almost collapses into the floor, shadow that resembles a monstrous being, liquefying into the very architecture. The triptych becomes not a story but an aftermath, it became a space of mourning, of breakdown. The viewer must piece together the before and after from fragments, from echoes, from stains.
If Beckmann and Bacon used the triptych to contain trauma, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol used the multi-panelled form to explore identity, not as continuity, but as fracture. Rauschenberg’s Autobiography (1968) presents his life as a triptych of overlays. Printed on mylar, it includes childhood photographs, X-rays of his spine, handwritten text, and scattered images of objects and landscapes. The result is neither confessional nor chronological. It is fragmentary, refractive, and self-aware.
In Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych (1962), the left panel repeats a colour image of Monroe twenty-five times, while the right shows the same image in grayscale, fading into abstraction. The split is stark. One side seduces, the other mourns. Together, they reflect the impossibility of portraiture in a media-saturated world. Warhol does not tell us who Marilyn was, instead he shows us how she vanished.
Some of the most significant explorations of the multi-panelled format regard each panel not as a vessel for narrative progression, but as an optical interval within a larger perceptual rhythm. In this sense, each panel operates as a singular unit of visual experience, structuring how attention moves, accumulates, and resolves across the entire pictorial field. In the work of Claude Monet, David Hockney, and Julie Mehretu, artists working across very different periods, the panel becomes a means of guiding the viewer through a spatial and temporal unfolding. Rather than offering a single image divided across parts, these works generate an experience that is durational, embodied, and open-ended.
Monet’s late Water Lilies series dissolves traditional pictorial structure. Painted during the last years of his life, these expansive works are less paintings than environments. At the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, the oval rooms designed to house them act not as galleries but as chapels of light. The panels curve around the viewer, their watery surfaces refusing a fixed point of entry. There is no foreground or background, no vanishing point. The horizon disappears. What remains is an enveloping field of suspended time, where water, light, and reflection drift beyond the painted edges. The multi-panelled format here is not used to divide space, but to extend it, horizontally, atmospherically, psychically.
David Hockney’s A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), composed of sixty individual canvases arranged in a grid, likewise explodes the notion of singular vision. Rather than offer a stable viewpoint, Hockney captures the landscape as it unfolds over time, where shifting light, changing weather, multiple angles stitched together like a visual fugue. The viewer must move laterally, physically, to perceive the work in its entirety. The panels do not form a coherent vista so much as they create a spatial rhythm. Each one alters perspective slightly, disrupting any illusion of seamless continuity.
Julie Mehretu’s Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts (2012) engages the panel as a site of layering, compression, and geopolitical entanglement. Referencing the Mogamma building in Cairo, a brutalist symbol of both bureaucracy and revolution, Mehretu’s four large-scale canvases are storm systems of mark-making. Architectural schematics collide with calligraphic gestures, cartographic fragments, and veils of erasure. These are not works to be read but inhabited. The panel in Mehretu’s hands is a fragment that resists finality. Meaning does not reside in any one part but emerges through oscillation, through the viewer’s own layered, time-bound encounter. The panels pulse with simultaneity, urgency, and unresolved memory.
For some artists, the multi-panelled work does not express rupture or immersion, but clarity, a distilled confrontation with form. Carmen Herrera’s diptychs and multi-panelled works attain a stark, radiant clarity through strict formal discipline. Though often aligned with Minimalism, her practice emerges from a different impulse, not to reduce meaning but to refine perception. Trained in architecture and entrenched in postwar abstraction during her years with the Salon des Réalités Nouvellesin Paris, Herrera committed early to working with no more than two colours per painting. A distinctive precision marked by planes of radiant colour and anchored by previse geometries was birthed from this form of constraint.
For Herrera, the diptych is not a compositional convenience but a structural strategy. “When the canvases are joined together, it’s like another type of division, different from a drawn line.” For her, the seam between panels becomes a real boundary, it is an unpainted interruption that is more assertive than one assigned to a surface. This form of division introduces rhythm and tension into otherwise flat fields. The edge is not a visual illusion but a perceptual hinge.
Herrera’s Diptych (Green & Black) (1976) captures the distilled power of the diptych format at its most formally minimal yet perceptually complex. The work consists of two near-identical canvases, each panel stages a black geometric mass flanked by a bold green shape, angular, yet subtly divergent from one another. The effect is not one of perfect reflection, but of mirrored asymmetry. There is a tension at the meeting point: not a clash, but a kind of held breath between surfaces.
The space between the panels is not a void but a pause, but a measured interval in a visual composition that behaves like music. Herrera understood the power of what she called “the drama of the straight line.” Her diptychs are not narrative. They are acts of balance and precision.
Tony Robins’ One and Three Chairs (2014) responds to Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 conceptual classic of the same title, which paired a physical chair, its photograph, and a dictionary definition to probe the instability of meaning between object, image, and language. Robins restages this triad as a true triptych, replacing each referent with its Base64 code (the string of characters used to encode digital data). Each panel displays a different version: one representing an actual chair, one the photograph, and one the dictionary text. But visually, they appear nearly identical, rendered in compressed, abstracted script, stripping away any distinguishable visual reference at first glance. The centre panel, the 'actual' chair, is in fact a Base64 output from architectural design software that could be 3D printed into a chair, but only at low resolution. In this recursive gesture, Robins destabilises both the authority of the visual, and the stability of the linguistic, the three units only share a shape. Where Kosuth’s piece divided language, image, and thing, Robins cleverly suggests their merger into a post-visual, post-material condition: the chair as potential, code, and artefact. The panel here becomes not just a part of a whole, or a piece of information, but a container for encrypted propositions about form, function, and perception.
Mark Rothko’s fourteen canvases for the Rothko Chapel in Houston form one of the most radical uses of the multi-panel format in twentieth-century art. Rather than presenting a narrative or a unified image, Rothko’s panels surround the viewer like a constellation of silent presences. The chapel is not a space to view paintings but a space to enter a field of paintings. The works do not function as illustrations or windows but as thresholds of perception. Each panel is discrete, but none stands apart from the whole.
Rothko believed that a painting is not complete until it is experienced. "A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer," he once said. In other words, the meaning and vitality of a painting only emerge in relation to the viewer’s presence. The Rothko Chapel becomes an architecture of this companionship. Its ambient light, now gently illuminates the dark surfaces of the canvases, creates not a fixed image but a fluctuating perceptual field. The paintings breathe with the room. They are activated by the viewer’s movement, attention, and silence. (The chapel posed numerous architectural challenges. In Rothko’s original sketch, he envisioned a parachute-like covering over the central skylight to replicate the diffused light conditions of the studio he occupied during the creation of these commissioned works. However, after the chapel opened, which is following Rothko’s death, the skylight was left uncovered. This resulted in harsh direct light flooding the centre of the space, making it difficult to properly view the dark paintings. Over time, a series of architectural interventions were introduced to address the issue. The final and current solution preserves the visual integrity and grandeur of the skylight while providing a softened, more evenly distributed light that honours Rothko’s original vision.)
This project was not simply about religion, scale or solemnity. Rothko controlled every element of the design and installation of the works, from seating, wall colour, to lighting, because the paintings could otherwise "die by the same token”, as Rothko notes. The chapel is not a space for individual paintings but for a collective atmosphere. As one writer observed: “The viewer enters not in front of a painting but into a field of paintings.” Another described the effect as “the most present of absences,” where the silence held within and between the canvases is what speaks loudest.
The individual panel, in this context, is not a narrative cell or a compositional fragment. It is a unit of being. The intervals between the paintings become as charged as the surfaces themselves. They invite the viewer to listen with the body, to encounter rather than interpret. Meaning arises not from within any one canvas but from the relation between all of them, and between viewer and space.
In this way, Rothko’s multi-panelled installation recovers something many believed modern art had lost: the aura. Not the aura of a singular masterpiece behind glass, but a distributed, lived aura, built from quiet rhythm, bodily stillness, and the pulsing intervals between panels. In this room, the paintings cease to be objects of art, they become environment, breath, prayer.
To write about multi-panelled works is not only to write about artists, but also about collectors, curators, and those who live among these joined works. In the context of a private residence or office, the modular becomes not merely a compositional strategy but a lived, spatial question. How a multi-panelled work is assembled, displayed, or dispersed alters not only its form but its significance.
Some collectors acquire a suite of panels intact, preserving the artist’s original sequence. Others, by necessity or choice, install individual canvases apart, perhaps across different walls, or even across several homes. The result is a kind of choreography. The meaning does not dissolve in this movement, rather it adapts, panels retain their internal logic but now breathe differently. They acquire new rhythms based on space, architecture, and the newfound aura of proximity.
Consider the case of BC artist James Chiang, whose multi-panelled works often operate at the scale of the monumental, yet are composed of discrete canvases. His large chromatic suites are never fixed in their assembly. One collector may hang a group of four as a horizontal band, echoing a landscape, another may stack them vertically, invoking a scroll, yet another arranging them in rows of two, allowing for infinite movements and expansiveness.
The ability to rearrange is not simply logistical, it is emotional. Panels carry memory, tone, atmosphere. When split apart, they become echoes of a whole and reminders of what is absent. At this moment, collecting is no longer about possession. Collectors of multi-panelled works find themselves being stewards, they hold not only objects, but sequences, and the inner workings of an artist. They hold the ultimate decision whether to separate or unite/reunite, to highlight rupture or restore flow. Their residence becomes sites of assembly, whatever their decisions might be, it will forever alter the lives of these multi-panelled works. They step into the artwork, not to alter the surface, but to initiate a rhythm. This is particularly true when panels are dispersed over time, when a work originally conceived as a whole may be sold in parts, each panel finds itself a new beginning.
Perhaps what draws us so deeply to the diptych, the triptych, and the multi-panelled work is not only their visual complexity but their quiet recognition of human incompletion. These formats speak in the language of parts and fragment, of parts reaching toward, echoing, or resisting one another, resembling our own perceptions, memories, or relationships. mutli-panelled work offers a kind of dignity to discontinuity, allowing beauty, meaning, and emotion to emerge not in spite of the breaks, but because of them. These works are not simply composed, they are composed of gestures toward assembly, and toward seeing, not all at once, but across time, across space, and through the shifting lens of the viewer’s own inner multiplicity.
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DAVID SPRIGGS AT PENTICTON ART GALLERY
Currently on view at the Penticton Art Gallery until October 25, 2025, David Spriggs presents two significant works. In the Main Gallery, First Wave suspends ninety hand-painted transparent layers into a towering red swell that hovers between motion and stillness. In the Project Gallery, Paradox of Power fragments the symbol of the bull into chromatic halves, exploring the uneasy tension between strength and vulnerability.
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Currently on view at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art, from September 26 to December 1, 2025, Jan Hoy’s exhibition Complex Simplicity reveals a sculptural practice rooted in restraint and precision. Working primarily in clay, steel, and bronze, Hoy refines each form to its essential gesture, exploring the delicate balance between solidity and openness. Her works resonate with the quiet rhythms of the Pacific Northwest landscape, offering a contemplative study of form, movement, and stillness that invites viewers into a state of meditative awareness.
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