Sold for: $18,720

PROVENANCE
West End Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection, Ontario

LITERATURE
William Kuhns and Léo Rosshandler, Sam Borenstein, 1978, reproduced page 65

Samuel Borenstein is one of Canada’s most distinctive Expressionists, known for the wild, impassioned energy in his brush-stroke and his strong primary colour palette. Although he was part of the fervid Montreal artistic milieu in the 1940s, his influences came particularly from the brilliant and explosive work of European masters such as Chaim Soutine and Vincent van Gogh. By the 1950s, as William Kuhns described, “his strokes grew bolder, his colours more vivid, the effect more volatile...Perspective, so elaborately achieved in the earlier landscapes, often had a seething, insecure quality – as though the spaces themselves were vulnerable to the eruptions going on within a canvas.” Borenstein painted primarily in Quebec’s Laurentians in the early 1960s; he lived in a schoolhouse at Lac Brûlé, from which he explored the surrounding landscape. In this vigorous work, air and water dominate, with the bridge dissecting zones of liquefied blues. Wildly gesticulating branches and bushes explode with hot red and intense yellow at the shoreline, adding their energy to this charged and vigorous work.

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