Additional Images

Provenance:

Artist's studio;
Gershon Iskowitz Foundation, Toronto, ON

Note:

Gershon Iskowitz was not prone to dramatic shifts in his work after 1960, and a continuity is clearly evident beginning with his earliest abstract works from circa 1965 onwards. From circa 1967 to 1979, his paintings were characterised by colour-figure compositions with juxtaposed white-grey passages. But in Iskowitz’s process, the white-grey passages were not “grounds” in a conventional sense as they were often painted on top of dominant colours. The figures-forms were irregular shapes akin to various 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.”

In 1980 there was a critical development that would continue to his last “project” – the ambitious multi-panel Northern Lights Septets 1984-86 – and his last works done in 1987. Yellow Blue – A is one of a series of 1980 paintings with reduced elements, a dominant figure colour on a dominant ground colour and titled accordingly. The figures are evenly distributed, as if floating, yet with no overarching movement or direction. In Yellow Blue – A, one yellow figure ‘exits’ the canvas on each side.

Of the approximately fifteen paintings in this series, six known works have blue grounds of varying hues, but this is the only one with a yellow figure: red was the most frequently-used figure colour. But true to his process, there is subtle and complex layering: the ground comprises several blue-green hues, and discrete passages of black at the edge of the yellow figures to create a dimensional quality rather than the flatness associated with “Greenberg” post-painterly abstraction.

For his very last paintings, Iskowitz used yellow hues as the dominant ground colour, as evidenced in works like Not Titled, ca. 1987.

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.

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