- 57
KEN WHISSON
Estimate
40,000 - 60,000 AUD
bidding is closed
Description
- Ken Whisson
- UNTITLED
- Dated end of 75 or beginning of 76' to reverse; bears artist's name, title and date on label on reverse
- Oil on composition board
- 81 by 107 cm
Provenance
Watters Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above
Exhibited
Ken Whisson, Some Recent Works, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, 6th October 1977, cat. 16
Catalogue Note
This untitled painting falls somewhere between the dense, painterly expressionism of Ken Whisson's 1960s pictures and his complex, image-pattern lattices of the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid to late 1970s the works go through a phase of marked reduction, where various forms from the artist's repertoire of shadow-glyphs float or dance over unmarked white grounds. It is almost as if the artist were tidying things up before leaving; he moved permanently to Perugia, Italy in 1977.
The blue and grey fields at the top of the present work define themselves as a sky space and therefore the whole as something in a landscape. However, the meaning or rather derivation of the shapes beneath is unclear. They suggest variously cloud or shadow, mountain or rock, bird or beast. Indeed, there may be a relationship between the iconography of this work and that of Green Horse, 1975 (collection of the artist)1. Regardless of its origins, it is a remarkable painting in the context of the artist's wider oeuvre, a daringly loose and weightless Kandinskian caprice.
1. Ken Whisson and John McDonald, Ken Whisson: Paintings 1947-1999 with writings and talks by the artist, Niagara Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, cat. 27, illus. p. 43
The blue and grey fields at the top of the present work define themselves as a sky space and therefore the whole as something in a landscape. However, the meaning or rather derivation of the shapes beneath is unclear. They suggest variously cloud or shadow, mountain or rock, bird or beast. Indeed, there may be a relationship between the iconography of this work and that of Green Horse, 1975 (collection of the artist)1. Regardless of its origins, it is a remarkable painting in the context of the artist's wider oeuvre, a daringly loose and weightless Kandinskian caprice.
1. Ken Whisson and John McDonald, Ken Whisson: Paintings 1947-1999 with writings and talks by the artist, Niagara Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, cat. 27, illus. p. 43