Gershon Iskowitz 1921 - 1988

Gallery Moos, Toronto

Mr. and Mrs. Goldfarb, Toronto

Private Collection

Toronto, Iskowitz, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982, no. 59

David Burnett, Iskowitz, Toronto 1982, p. 64

Adele Freedman, Gershon Iskowitz, Painter of Light, Toronto, 1982, p. 107, no. 28

This work has been view under UV and it is in pristine condition.
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Through a formal analysis alone, Iskowitz could be associated with the colour field painters that came before him and who were his contemporaries. However, he remains an Impressionist painter and was more concerned with atmosphere and the structure of colour in nature than he was in making radical statements about surface and painting.

This canvas celebrates his deep love of the Canadian landscape, which became a constant inspiration for him after he had an epiphany when seeing it from the air during an autumn flight. This is not a literal depiction, of course, but an abstraction in which the emotional response he sought to express was embedded in a carefully constructed framework. Sextet represents a crucial pivot in the painter's evolution where he is moving away from a static representation of an object towards a fluttering pattern of colour and light.

David Burnett comments that "Iskowitz's work in the mid-1960s shows clearly how he develops the gradual shift from the references to landscape - to skies and trees - towards the development of an autonomous painted structure - to something that arises from the dynamics of its own making."

In the course of his life after he survived the concentration camps of Poland as a young man, Iskowitz moved very slowly, step by step , from the dark, burdened, and often murky subjects that reflected his tortured early life to visions of light, colour and joy. This canvas marks the beginning of his emergence as both an important painter who has synthesized his past and his present.