In the summer of 1962 Melehi left Minneapolis (where he was briefly a teaching assistant at Minneapolis College of Art & Design) for New York City. Having been awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation he stayed in New York until 1964. During his time there he was included in two major group exhibitions, at MOMA, New York and the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. It was not until his solo exhibition at the Bronx Museum in 1984 that Melehi exhibited again in the USA.

In New York Melehi was influenced by the city's hard edged abstract painters and fashionable ideas prevailing at the time He also developed a passion for jazz, listening to music whilst he painted, which added a certain melodic and bold quality to his works.

In this painting a grid of small blue squares allude to the skyline and office tower blocks of New York, adding an architectural facet to his abstract works. Melehi's interest in cybernetics is also expressed pictorially - the blue squares appear like perforated cards used in computers from that period. The squares lies diagonally across a biomorphic red form that recurs in his paintings, sometimes suggestively.