Additional Images

Provenance:

Artist’s studio;
Gershon Iskowitz Foundation

Proceeds from the sale of this lot to benefit the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.

Exhibited:

Four of the 1980 series were shown at Gallery Moos, Toronto, January-February 1981.

Note:

In 1967, Iskowitz began a regular practice of working in a series of variations on a similar composition. For this 1980 suite of paintings, Iskowitz worked with reduced elements, a dominant “figure” and colour on a dominant ground colour. The “figure” is an irregular shape akin to cumulus humilis cloud forms. Professor Theodore Heinrich wrote of Iskowitz lying on grass gazing up “through the leafy tent of a tree or through rents in cloud cover [as a] source for intense chromatic adventure.” These figures are “distributed,” floating, with no implied movement or direction. Of the approximately fifteen paintings in this series, six known works have blue grounds of varying tones; red is the most frequently-used “figure” colour. However, as with all of Iskowitz’s abstract paintings, there is subtle and complex layering, a hallmark of his work beginning in the early 1960s. The red figure ”cloud” elements in Blue Red - G have highlights of yellow at the edges. Secondary and less-pronounced “figure” patches of lighter blues—with some yellow highlights—create a dimensional quality rather than the flatness associated with “Greenberg” post-painterly abstraction.

The reductive quality of this series harkens to Iskowitz’s so-titled “landscape” abstract paintings from 1967, as he did return to earlier compositions, and again in his last works done in 1987. See Autumn Landscape #2, collection of the Art Gallery of York University.

Ihor Holubizky is a cultural essayist and art historian. He received his PhD in art history from the University of Queensland.

References:
Theodore Allen Heinrich, “The intimate cartography of Gershon Iskowitz’s painting,” artscanada, (May/June 1977), 12.