BRETT WHITELEY

Australian Galleries, Sydney
Private Collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 1990

Recent Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, Ceramics and Wood Carvings from Byron Bay, Marrakesh, Japan, San Gimignano -Tuscany, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 1 March - 26 March 1990, cat. 27

Original stretcher and framed under perspex, work appears to have no visible defects and appears to have very good overall condition.
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Born in Sydney and intent on a career as an artist from boyhood, Brett Whiteley achieved recognition in Britain, Europe and the United States before returning permanently to Australia in 1969. In 1976 he won both the Archibald and the Sulman Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the following year the Wynne Prize for landscape with his great Jacaranda Tree (On Sydney Harbour). He is regarded as one of this country's most important twentieth century artists, and is represented in all major Australian public collections.

This substantial, impressive painting-collage dates from the artist's European sojourn of 1989. Variously combed and striated by terraces, furrows and groves of trees, the Tuscan hills fold and curve like an inviting bedspread. Scale and perspective are simultaneously defined and confounded by vertical photo collagè elements - roadside cypresses and medieval watch towers - giving the work a fairytale unreality.

Whiteley also brings to the Italian landscape memories of his friend and inspiration Lloyd Rees, for whom San Gimignano was particularly important. In turn this association summons another landscape shared by the two artists: the central west of New South Wales. The roads and rivers that meander so sensuously through Whiteley's 1970s 'Chinese' Australian landscapes - of Marulan, Oberon, Carcoar, Bathurst - are in this work resurrected in a European setting, though here they are translated into the single great curve of a medieval city wall. Interestingly, this sweeping graphic gesture is essentially the same as that which describes the quais along the Seine in the near-contemporary Fifteen great dog pisses of Paris, 1989.¹

1. It is possible that both works contain an oblique reference to the great art world scandal of 1989; the destruction of Richard Serra's public sculpture Tilted Arc.