Sold for: $17,500

PROVENANCE
Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, Toronto
Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, November 21, 2018, lot 46
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt, 1990, reproduced page x, titled as Big V Abstraction

During the 1980s, numerous currents were swirling in Jack Shadbolt’s paintings – insect forms, manifested spectacularly in his Butterfly series, First Nations imagery, environmental commentary, and emblematic abstract motifs such as in this painting. Shadbolt was working boldly with shape - his central geometric form, the V, although strongly defined, has organic rather than hard edges. Brushy clouds of paint drift over and behind the V, while fragmented forms waft freely around it. Although the work’s title states “Abstract,” the spatial associations of landscape are still present – a dark strip acts as ground, and the softly modulated background reads as sky. Shadbolt’s use of colour is charged – hot red and yellow project chromatic excitement, balanced by cooler greens, blues and luscious purple. In works like this, as Scott Watson wrote of Shadbolt, “It was through colour and a syntax of fragmented, floating forms that he intended to achieve a language of metaphorical form.” Shadbolt’s modernist vision kept him evolving and expanding in a lyrical and potent way, and Abstract Sketch #2 is a vital and emphatic embodiment of his creative explosion in the 1980s.

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