Calgary I, 1964 belongs to Marion Nicoll’s Calgary series, produced after her return to Alberta following study and travel abroad, including time in New York and Europe. Nicoll had trained at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary and later studied under Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, where she was exposed to modernist abstraction and colour theory. By the 1960s, she had fully transitioned from early representational work to abstraction, and in this series she turned to Calgary as a point of reference, not as a subject to depict, but as a structure to interpret. The painting reflects this shift, reducing form and space into a controlled, geometric language shaped by both her international influences and her position within the development of modern art in Western Canada.