Sold for: $91,250

PROVENANCE
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Vancouver, circa 2000

LITERATURE
Michelle Gewurtz, Molly Lamb Bobak: Life & Work, Art Canada Institute, 2018, pages 20 and 69, https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/molly-lamb-bobak/biography/

From 1957 to 1961, Molly Bobak, her husband Bruno and their two young children traveled extensively in Europe, more specifically in Paris, England and Norway, thanks to several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. After Bruno was nominated as director of the University of New Brunswick’s Art Centre, and both he and Molly were offered teaching positions at the university, the Bobaks settled in Fredericton in 1961. They quickly became a vital part of the city’s art scene, while still nurturing their connections with other artist friends in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

In Fredericton, Molly found interest in “urban landscapes and especially the people who populated them,” as art historian Michelle Gewurtz writes. During that period, her works depicted scenes of daily modern life that captured “a moment from some lived, communal experience.… They achieve a careful balance of form, colour, and space, creating a clear, rationalized vision of moving scenes that are intentionally devoid of narrative.” These paintings, her crowd scenes, became emblematic of Bobak’s work, and they are set in a variety of locations: the beach, balls, public squares and skating rinks.

This large work, Skaters in Fredericton, is an outstanding example of Bobak’s crowd paintings. Here, the characters seem to glide fluidly over the ice, rendered in elegant and expressionistic brush-strokes. Bobak painted a number of skating scenes, a quintessentially Canadian theme, which allowed her to experiment with movement, rhythm and dynamic positioning of the figures within the luminous white space of the ice rink. Anecdotally, it is said that one of the houses depicted could have been the Bobaks’ when they lived in Fredericton.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars