Ti Parks

The artist
Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2002

Virginias: a sculpture of a total environment, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, July-August 1969
(possibly) Ti Parks, Watters Gallery, Sydney, December 1969
Ti Parks, Art Projects, Melbourne, 1979
Abstraction II, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 15 October - 2 November 2002, cat. 20

Abstraction II, Melbourne: Charles Nodrum, 2002, cat. 20 (illus.)

This work is unframed, there is some scuffing to the lower left hand edge. There are no tears. There is a mark in the dark blue area in the upper right corner of the painting. This work is in good condition, consistent with age.
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British artist Ti Parks came to Australia in 1964 after graduating from the Slade School, London. While he only remained in this country for ten years, he had a substantial impact on the local scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a pioneer of hard-edge painting, construction, conceptual and environmental art.

This contribution was acknowledged by a later generation in awarding the artist a residency at Gertrude Street Artist Spaces, Melbourne, in 2004. The catalogue of the associated exhibition proclaimed that: ' ...Parks' stay in Melbourne was a significant one for the local art community, and he built lasting, vital relationships with a great many artists, curators and gallerists. His interest in, and development of alternative forms of sculpture, assemblage and collage were particularly influential: the 1960s and 1970s were the decades in which Parks' practice became invested in improvised sculpture and found objects, the media for which he is now well-known and celebrated. His influence on subsequent generations of Australian artists cannot be overestimated.'¹

The present work is one of those paintings of 'coloured squares and oblongs controlled, more or less, by eccentric systems of perspective'² which were exhibited concurrently with the notorious installation Virginias: a sculpture of a total environment at Tolarno Galleries in July 1969. Patrick McCaughey described Virginias as 'both wayward and alien'³, but these were the very qualities which Sydney critic Donald Brook applauded when the paintings were shown at Watters Gallery in December of that year. Brook described Parks' work as 'flexible, open-ended, enjoyable and intelligent', and noted: 'The most engaging strategy in this exhibition is one of cunning misdirection. The first impression is of simple order and regularity; but as one looks and thinks one begins to pick out flaws in the system, to notice how each principle of order is at some point given such a twist that one can scarcely distinguish it from disorder.

'For example: a flat pattern resolves into a set of three-dimensional boxes as one imports to the perception a knowledge of perspective. And then that way of taking the matter collapses, because the vanishing-points are wrong. A feeling soon develops (as with Escher's irrational figures, but less explicitly cued) that one is seeing something impossible.'⁴

With its combination of reductive hard-edge geometry, serial repetition, op-art deception and wild, psychedelic colour, the present work is a remarkable and powerful artefact, both a synthesis of and a challenge to the 'progressive' artistic shibboleths of the late 1960s.

1.  Jeff Khan, Ti Parks: G-Street tent show, Melbourne: Gertrude Street Contemporary Art Spaces, 2004
2.  Alan McCulloch, 'Fresh feeling', Herald, 30 July 1969, p. 25
3.  Patrick McCaughey, Age, 30 July 1969, p. 2
4.  Donald Brook, 'For looking – and thinking', Sydney Morning Herald, 11 December 1969, p. 14