Sold for: $7,500

PROVENANCE
An Important Private Collection, Toronto

EXHIBITED
The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Harold Town: The First Exhibition of New Work, 1969-1973, May 15 - June 24, 1973

Harold Town was a leading artist of his time, but also a tireless iconoclast, and that tendency can be clearly discerned here. His use of oil paint could achieve extremes of impasto, applied with painterly flourish or even applied directly from the tube. The opposite could also be true, with his deft and precise delineations of the medium defined by careful, nearly surgical masking. That particular approach is explored here in Town’s excruciatingly exact, crisply edged zones of paint, each in its own pure and singular colour. In contrast, however, two strictly geometric boxes contain vigorously gestural applications containing the majority of the colours in the surrounding discreet regions. Offsetting all of this are the flat olive green of the ground, and the bordering and tumbling blocks of black. In a further contrasting choice, the strictness of the masking is undermined in the blocks’ subtly feathered ends. Here, in 25 by 25 inches, Town seems to investigate all of the facets of argument between flatness and depth in the abstract painting theories of his time, masterfully interrogating, subverting, and celebrating them at once.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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