Sold for: $55,250

PROVENANCE
Gallerie Gilles Gheerbrant, Montreal
Private Collection, Montreal

LITERATURE
Matthew Teitelbaum, Paterson Ewen: The Montreal Years, Mendel Art Gallery, 1987, page 27

Near the end of 1954, Paterson Ewen painted his first abstract work. He was involved with the Automatists, then gravitated towards the Plasticiens in Montreal, although he never entirely embraced either movement. In 1961, Ewen was experimenting a lot with abstraction, and generated his Lifestream, Alert and Blackout series. This richly hued work is strongly textured – it is streaked and scraped, creating a strong pattern of lines across the surface. Ewen used irregular geometric squares in his colour fields, some of which submerge into the upper gold section, while one, caught on the edge between the two fields, transforms into black in the green section, suggesting space and creating tension. Matthew Teitelbaum wrote of these works, “Playfulness was inherent. Deep eruptive textures were created by dragging sawblades across the surface; paint was pulled into ridges, and smudged into crevices.” Intimations can be seen here of Ewen’s work to come, the Phenomena series, in both the way in which the surface is textured and the line that originates above the top of the picture plane and drags through both fields, like a fork of lightning.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars