T00141

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Lot 19
  • 19

William Kurelek 1927 - 1977

Estimate
60,000 - 80,000 CAD
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Description

  • William Kurelek
  • The Sacrament of Penance
  • signed with initials lower right; titled on the reverse
  • mixed media on board
  • 66.1 by 96.5 cm.
  • 26 by 38 in.

Provenance

Isaacs Gallery, Toronto
Jacox Galleries Ltd, Edmonton
Dr. and Mrs. H. Armstrong, Hamilton
Private Collection, Ontario

Exhibited

The Armstrong Collection, University of Calgary, Calgary, 1968

Literature

University of Calgary, The Armstrong Collection, Calgary, 1968, listed.
Joan Murray, Kurelek's Vision of Canada, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, 1982, p. 16.

Catalogue Note

As the artist noted “I tend to flout artistic rules by doing taboo things like dividing a composition exactly in half.” And in fact, the very arrangement of this painting is an immediate signifier of its central theme of duality: nature is portrayed as provider and destroyer, and conflicting notions of sin and salvation are implicit.

The farmer on the left, who has yet to cross over into a life of repentance and be saved, is imprisoned by the red line demarcating his sin; closed off by this fence, his destitute fate is clear from the barren field, the rotting bones of his cow, and the fruitless branches of the tree in the background.

In stark contrast, the farmer on the right has found, and advocates, deliverance; behind him, his land grows fertile. This farmer has tapped a wellspring of fortune and salvation, and gestures to his neighbour that the same is available to him, should he choose the open door of penance as a ‘vehicle’ to salvation.

The Sacrament of Penance is a powerful example of the deeply religious Kurelek’s most profoundly personal subject matter, a picture into which he has poured his history, his heart, and indeed, his soul.