Additional Images

Provenance:

Gallery Moos Ltd., Toronto, ON
Private Collection, Hamilton, ON
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Exhibited:

Gershon Iskowitz, Gallery Moos Ltd., Toronto, 17 Jan - 4 Feb 1981.

Note:

The 1970s was a period of high creative productivity for Gershon Iskowitz. His work came to wide and critical attention, first through his celebrated Lowlands and Uplands series (1969 – 1972), and in the mid-1970s, the Highlands-titled and related paintings. The Uplands were featured in the 1972 Venice Biennale, when Iskowitz represented Canada in tandem with sculptor Walter Redinger.

During this decade, Iskowitz’s work was shown in public gallery solo exhibitions at Hart House/University of Toronto, the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, and the Owens Art Gallery/Art Gallery of Nova Scotia – his first solo exhibition in New York – and travelling group exhibitions across Canada, and internationally: Seven Canadian Painters, toured to eleven venues across Australia and New Zealand in 1977-78.

While the mid-1970s are considered a ‘classic’ Iskowitz period, he continued to develop his approaches and techniques for abstraction. Blue Mauve-C is a prime example of Iskowitz’s inventiveness. The convention of figure on ground is inverted in his underpainting of amorphous green, yellow, purple and pink forms. This ground is overpainted with blues to form ‘strands’ of the bolder underpaint. There is also a reversal of atmospheric perspective – typically an illusion of depth with paler and cooler colours painted in the background. Related and later paintings include Night Greens D, 1981 – featured on the dust cover of Adele Freeman’s 1982 monograph Gershon Iskowitz, Painter of Light – and Orange Yellow C, 1982. (Collection of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.)

On the rare occasions that Iskowitz spoke of his impulses and approaches, he emphasized a living experience, left open for interpretation, rather than a prescribed formal theory:

There has to be a certain kind of reality in it [and] a form of communication. My work is more like...space, and poems; and it relates to my daily living. What we do is paint; we build an image, a form. It’s not an obvious form, it’s private.[1]

[1] David Bolduc interview with Gershon Iskowitz, Proof Only (Toronto), January 15, 1974.

We thank Ihor Holubizky for this essay. Holubizkyr is a cultural essayist and art historian. He received his PhD in Art History from the University of Queensland.