PROVENANCE
Gallery Moos Ltd., Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Gershon Iskowitz’s painting saw a breakthrough after he received a Canada Council grant in 1967 that allowed him to travel to northern Manitoba, at the edge of the Arctic along the coast of Hudson Bay. The artist was struck by the luminous, clarified colour and expansive geographies of the northern landscape. Several further excursions followed through the next decade, to Churchill, James Bay and Yellowknife, and the lasting impact on the artist’s painting was profound: inspired by the aerial perspective of the landscape seen from the small bush planes in which he traveled, Iskowitz returned to Toronto from each trip with an increasingly complex and grand approach to his abstraction in both palette and composition.

Orange—G is a potent and intimate expression of the lively, dematerialized topographies Iskowitz produced during his mature period. Floating daubs of gauzy colour are perceived through breaks in the sinuous vapour haze that drifts across the foreground. Here we get the distinct impression of the luminous colour of a rolling lower landscape, or the glinting glow of lights perceived through the trailing surface of clouds. While the spatial elements here are distinct, we sense the arrangement expanding beyond the boundaries of the canvas—the landscape dissolving into an expanded intensity of colour and commotion.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars