Additional Images

Provenance:

Marlborough-Godard Gallery, Toronto/Montreal
Mira Godard, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Exhibited:

"Montreal of the 50s, 60s, 70s" Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto, 2-23 February 2008

Note:

Yves Gaucher’s Grey on Grey series of paintings, a body of some sixty works produced from 1967 to 1969, indicated a turning point, stripping back schematic symmetry and colour in favour of rhythmic monochromes.
This work — produced at a critical juncture immediately following Grey on Grey, when the artist was having a period of creative doubt — takes some obvious developmental and compositional cues from the earlier series. Here, grey monochromes are substituted with gradations of blue and white on a flat, neutral, azure-white field. Rather than scattered, repeating signals of earlier works, the lines of B.W.VI are anchored and regular, concentrated on the right-hand edge with two repeated short patterns. Two long threads of blue stretching nearly across the top of the canvas are stitched together by a floating line of white. Fused together, the lines threaten to interrupt the continuity of the pale ground. It seems to presage his later works characterised by wider horizontal bands of colour. This work remains sparse and intentional, a rejection of gesture and an embrace of structural non-objectivity.