Franciszka Themerson was a Polish-British, painter, illustrator, filmmaker, and stage designer. Alongside photography and avant-garde filmmaking with her partner Stefan, Franciszka also had an independent career as a painter. An instinctive artisan, she steadily defined her own ways of painting that enabled her to draw with and into the paint, using sharp objects, like knives, sticks, canes and fingers, anything that avoided the direct use of a brush, and always with an effortless artistry. Her work also very often explores the issues and position of women within the art system. Her major solo and group exhibitions include those at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Gruenebaum, New York; Galeria Kordegarda, Warsaw; L’étrangère, London; Richard Saltoun Gallery, London; The Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; New Gallery, Belfast; Gallery Demarco, Edinburgh; Museum of Art, Łódź; Nordjyllands Kunstmusum, Aalborg; Gardner Centre, Brighton; Redfern Gallery, London; Royal Festival Hall, London; Imperial War Museum, London; Art First, London; GV Art, London; and Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk.

Franciszka Themerson's artistic practice often needs to be understood in the context of the surrealist tradition. She often places the figures she depicts in the context of the grotesque, with the goal of sending a particular socio-political message. She can convey extreme levels of absurdity in her deformations of reality. Her composition is dynamic and unrestricted, adhering to no rules. In Figure between red and blue, an explicit distortion of reality aims to expose the unspoken, deliberately breaking the boundaries, limitations and standards usually govern speech.