Sold for: $31,250

PROVENANCE
Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Harold Town painted this early Abstract Expressionist work during the formative years of Painters Eleven, a group of Toronto-based painters who were determined to advance the case of abstraction and modernism in Ontario. Town quickly established himself as a standout in Anglo-Canada’s nascent abstract art movement. He was earnestly developing his own non-figurative language while explicitly looking to the painterly advancements happening in New York - in particular Willem de Kooning’s action paintings.

Typical of his paintings in this early period, the entire canvas of The Yard is covered in a dense collage of textured brushwork, confidently overlaid with colour that arrives in bright shocks and energetic sweeps. Calligraphic scrawls move in tremors across the broadly applied pigment, and the whole canvas seems to buzz in a dense medley of colour and bristling energy. Town was often playful in naming his Abstract Expressionist canvases, and was frequently more interested in complicating rather than clarifying the relationship between the title and painted image. Here, we are not given a clear direction on how to interpret The Yard. Evoking something geographic or architectural, Town’s title suggests that the canvas has expanded to become a dimensionalized space, bursting at the seams to contain the painter’s vibrant expressionism.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars