Additional Images

Provenance:

The Isaacs Gallery, Toronto, ON;
Private collection, Toronto, ON;
Waddington's, Toronto, ON, 23 Nov. 2015, lot 112;
Private collection, Toronto, ON

Literature:

Ian Thom, John Meredith: Drawings 1957-1980 (catalogue), Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1980

Note:

The 1960s were a different era in the arts. The depth of belief in an avant-garde, progress in art and individual artistic development two generations ago might be difficult to comprehend through the current interpretive lens of identities and practices. In this context, John Meredith’s March 1967 exhibition at Toronto’s Isaacs Gallery was exemplary in what used to be called ‘breakthrough’ exhibitions, and where he first exhibited the eponymous canvas related to Sketch for Ramadan.

Meredith had been on the Toronto art scene for years, exhibiting regularly and paying his dues as a developing abstract painter – savvy enough to move beyond second-generation Abstract Expressionism, and individual enough to develop his own language instead of aping New York style. In the mid-1960s, he began to use improvised abstractions in pen and ink as the bases for his paintings. Fine and distinct in Toronto, they lacked capital-A ambition. This changed with the March 1967 exhibition that included the canvas after Sketch for Ramadan. Reviewing the exhibition in the Toronto Daily Star, Robert Fulford specifically discussed the paintings Atlantis and Ramadan when he observed Meredith’s more complicated paintings, “combine a kind of violence with sensitivity in a uniquely attractive way.” In Sketch for Ramadan we see that violence and sensitivity in prime, unfettered form.