Painted between 1956 and 1958, Adolph Gottlieb's  Polychrome Maze  belongs to the artist's significant Imaginary Landscapes series. As is typical of works from this group,  Polychrome  Maze  is rendered as an abstracted, emotionally charged pseudo-landscape; the canvas is bisected into zones of earth and sky, demarcated by a notable horizon line, creating an earthly reference atypical of the work of his fellow Abstract Expressionists. Below, feverishly painted brushstrokes fill up the lower register as spots of primary colors peek out from underneath them. These strokes of deep black paint recall Gottlieb's earlier series of Pictographs, for which he initially achieved notoriety, and which began many of the philosophical and intellectual themes he would carry through to his Imaginary Landscapes and Burst paintings. Above, a more pared-down scene emerges as three ovoid shapes hover weightlessly on a light-yellow ground. Despite the hints at a real-world relationship between figure and ground, there is an apparent lack of suggestion of perspectival space. Instead, the composition's flatness is welded together through this certain but inexpressible relationship between the shapes and their support. 

The year Gottlieb began  Polychrome Maze, 1956, was crucial for further artistic breakthroughs and professional development. 1956 was both the year Gottlieb started his relationship with the Martha Jackson Gallery and the year he secured a retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York. This year would likewise see Gottlieb paint his first Burst paintings, a series of works with a natural lineage to the Imaginary Landscapes: the brushier, more densely populated areas are parsed down into ethereal cloud-like forms. As for his philosophical leanings, Gottlieb penned a series of notes titled  Polarities, where he weighed the balance of opposites observed in areas such as science, abstract thinking, and personal psychology, concluding that successful works of art depend on the balance and interplay between these contrasting forces. As the  Brooklyn Rail  notes: "By engaging in this line of thinking, his explorations of 1956 produced a richer body of work than any other single year of his career; works from that year contain the seeds for all Gottlieb's paintings of the next seventeen years." ("Adolph Gottlieb: Polarities"  The Brooklyn Rail, 2016).