Untitled (number 4) reveals Hans Hofmann’s influence on Matter’s early work. Painted in 1933, the first year that she began taking Hofmann’s evening painting course at the Art Students League, this work exhibits the principles of Hofmann’s “push/pull” theory, a method of combining opposing forces in color and shape in order to create the illusion of space, depth and movement on a two-dimensional plane. Matter uses loud, bright tones of blue, green, yellow, orange, black and white in the many abstract shapes that fill this paper that has been laid down on canvas. Many of these shapes are rooted in a quadrilateral form, though Matter heavily manipulates them into more fluid, biomorphic versions, making the canvas feel more chaotic than calculated. Keeping in tune with Hofmann’s “push/pull” method, Matter layers one shape on top of another to make some appear closer, and others farther away, some even extending off the canvas. She continues to enhance this effect through shading, as well as an intentional, though seemingly ununiformed, spacing between the shapes. Each mark is deliberate so as to not break the illusion of three-dimensionality.