Current Exhibition: Spring 2022

Private Collection, Sydney

David Aspden is considered one of Australia’s foremost ‘colour-field’ abstraction painters. Gaining prominence in the 1960s he continued painting up until his death in 2005. Inspired by colour, music and landscape, this monumental painting is one of the finest examples of the artist’s mastery at conveying the relationships between these themes.

The composition is a visual melody that gently shifts as the eye focuses on the changing areas of colour. Similar to the Jazz music he loved, the lyrical approach to his painting is emphasised in Pennant Hills by the energetic gestural marks that dance across the canvas. Aspden worked cleverly with the harmony and collision of colours, conveyed in the subject work with softs hues of cool mauves and purples juxtaposed with warm tones of pinks and reds.

Galleria Schettini, Milan, Italy; 

Galleria Michelangelo, Bergamo, Italy; 

Private collection;

Sotheby’s, Modern and Contemporary, Sydney, March 2005, lot 60;

Company collection, Sydney;

Deutscher Hackett, Important Australian and International Fine Art, Sydney, April 2019, lot 55;

Private collection, Sydney 

“Yvonne Audette holds a unique position in twentieth century Australian art as one of the few female artists of her generation to have maintained a long and successful career working in an abstract mode. She left Australia to further her studies in late 1952, however unlike most of her peers, headed to New York, influenced by her American-born parents’ agreement to provide financial support if she went there rather than to Europe. While her training had been traditionally academic, with an emphasis on the figure, Audette’s first-hand exposure to the work of artists including Willem de Kooning (whose studio she visited in 1953), Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey brought her face to face with the burgeoning New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting and she began to move confidently towards abstraction, developing a unique visual language that merged a lyrical use of colour with dextrous mark-making and the textural layering of line and abstract form.

After travelling in Europe, Audette settled in Florence, establishing a studio there in 1955. Against the backdrop of Italy’s rich culture and artistic past, she was welcomed into a community of professional artists (including Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana), who encouraged her and provided an aspirational example. Focussed and determined, Audette worked hard, holding commercial exhibitions in Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome and London.

While Audette’s work was rarely seen in Australia during her expatriate years, it has since been recognised for its important contribution to the history of twentieth century art in this country. Acquisitions by major public galleries were followed by a series of institutional exhibitions – Queensland Art Gallery (1999), Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000), National Gallery of Victoria (2008), Ian Potter Museum of Art (2009) and the Art Gallery of Ballarat (2016) – and the publication of a major monograph in 2003.

Audette was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the June 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for significant service to the visual arts as an abstract painter.”

– Kirsty Grant for Deutscher and Hackett, April 2019

Collection of the artist, Canberra;

Thence by descent;

Deutscher and Hackett, Important Australian and International Fine Art, Sydney, 10/04/2018;

Private collection, Sydney

Rosalie Gascoigne 1985, Fine Arts Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 8 – 28 September 1985, cat. 3 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 15 October – 1 November 1986, cat. 1

From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, Drill Hall Gallery, Australia National University, Canberra, 5 September – 8 October 2000, cat. 17

Legge Gallery, Sydney;

Private colection, Sydney

Pace Gallery, London;

Private Collection, Sydney

Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Los Angeles, US, 25-28 January, 2018

Berlin-based Canadian artist Beth Letain engages with the history of colour and abstraction. While her works feel minimalist compositionally, they are vivid with strong colour painted on white canvas. Letain’s geometric structures are harmonious and rhythmic, referencing Agnes Martin, Mary Heilmann and the Bauhaus theories of colour. This work is of magnificent scale with lashings of oil and rich pigment, so characteristic of the artist’s style. Her works are simple and enduring. 

Private collection, Australia;
Bridget McDonnell Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso);
Private collection;
Sotheby’s, New York, 31 October 1984, lot 143;
Severn Family Foundation Collection;
Bonhams, Important Australian Art, 24 August 2021, lot 71;
Private collection, Sydney

Macquarie Galleries, Sydney;

Dr Karen Helms, Christopher Day Gallery, Paddington;

The Estate of the Late Peter Morris, Sydney;

Private collection, Sydney

Autumn Exhibition 1989, Christopher Day Gallery, Paddington, Cat. No. 4

Born in Armidale, NSW in 1879, Thea Proctor was one of the best-known Australian women painters of her time. Studying in both Sydney and London, Proctor exhibited painted fans, inspired largely by the works of Charles Conder, at the 1907 Women’s Work exhibition in Venice. Upon her return to Australia she helped form The Contemporary Group with G.W. Lambert in order to encourage younger avant-garde painters. Her beautiful pictures underpinned Sydney Modernism throughout the 1920s, and in her later life she did a great deal to bring attention to the work of her cousin, John Peter Russell.

Private collection, Sydney

Ben Quilty recalls he conceived this painting as something of a mask – a Captain Cook mask the artist himself could put on to imagine the world through the eyes of the famous 18th century explorer. Having read extensively through Cook’s diaries, Quilty became fascinated by the man’s initial self belief, an attitude that doubtless contributed to him becoming one of maritime history’s most famous navigators, astronomers and sailors. With the passage of time however, Quilty observed violent changes in Cook’s behaviour toward both his crew and the native populations he encountered.

Cook’s bouts of extreme violence, Quilty along with others postulates, was due in large part to debilitating and personality changing gut conditions, the result of chronic disease. In analysing this change the artist states that ‘Mask’ looks at ‘…the good, the bad and the ugly’. The rorschach technique employed is perfect, providing a multiple image which delves into the human psyche, a reflection and investigation of James Cook the man, and his changing psychological states.

One of the first two Indigenous artists to represent Australia at the 1990 Venice Biennale, Rover Thomas’ works sparked a greater appreciation of Aboriginal art, both nationally and internationally.

A desert man, the story of his life is interwoven with that of the Canning Stock Route. Thomas was born in the 1920s and raised in the Country around its middle stretches. At an early age he was picked up by a drover, Wally Dowling, and taken north to Billiluna and the Kimberley. He became a stockman himself, and eventually married and settled at Turkey Creek. There, in the 1970s, he pioneered the East Kimberley school of ochre painting on canvas.