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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Barry & Anne Pang Collection
• Sale Date:
  18 Oct 2015 ~ 2.30pm
• Lot #:
  24
• Lot Description:
  Rick Amor
  (born 1948)
  MW in the Street 1998
  oil on canvas
  164 x 74 cm and 164 x 130 cm (two panels)
  signed and dated lower right: RICK AMOR 98; both panels titled and dated verso: MW IN THE STREET Sep 98
• Provenance:
  Niagara Galleries, Melbourne; Private collection, Melbourne
• Exhibited:
  Tony Palmer Fine Art, Sydney, in association with Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 1999
• References:
  Patrick McCaughey, Strange Country: why Australian painting matters, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2014, pp.329-330 (illustrated p.329)
• Notes:
  MW in the Street is a rare painting in Rick Amor's oeuvre in that it is a diptych and features a double portrait with himself and his wife Meg Williams as the subjects. However, in the construction of his paintings, Amor is a pragmatic technician first and a romantic second. It would be easy to see MW in the Street as a celebration of their union but the artist had far more practical matters as his first consideration. The original source was one of the first portraits he did of Meg shortly after they met titled The Street 1984, a square-format painting which was used as the illustration for his Niagara Galleries solo show the following year.1 In this work, Meg is bareheaded with her tresses falling messily to her shoulders as she looks directly out of the picture frame. She has just passed a looming male figure who continues in the opposite direction with a large dog by his side. Painted in Amor's expressionist style of the mid-1980s, the front walls of the terrace houses lean out at a precarious angle contributing to a sense of anxious turbulence. By contrast, MW in the Street is calmer, reflective and more precise in its painterliness. Amor says he found himself with two canvases of the same height and, as the first painting had been sold and he was uncertain of its location, decided to revisit the earlier work in a diptych form.2 Meg does not like posing so he worked from photographs and the result is a fine and lovingly executed portrait of her rugged up in a fur-lined coat. Amor appears in the second panel but unusually for an artist who has painted many searing frontal self-portraits, he is seen here from the rear, Ôthere but not there, like an apparition.' Gary Catalano's monograph on the artist The Solitary Watcher3 is so titled for the reason that Amor spends time quietly observing and photographing potential subjects, unobtrusively aside from the rest of the world; and in MW in the Street, he has depicted himself in that very act. Rather than the ominous presence in the 1984 painting, the dog is now Amor's trusty companion and both are painted with a light application of painting emphasising his stated desire to appear spectral. In his recent book on Australian Painting, Patrick McCaughey writes that in this diptych there is Ôa parallel sense of constriction at street level. The street is recognisably one in Carlton. It leads to a square, over which looms the baneful mass of a housing commission estate. A wintry bleakness pervades the scene. MW is wrapped up against the cold and the tree in the middle ground is stripped of foliage. Amor has created a sense of lived experience that is both familiar and representative; this inner-city environment has become the landscape of the heart. The past shapes it as the fragments of terrace houses lend formality and dignity to the street. The present may be fraught, as MW and the artist walk off in different directions, although the dog, that abiding symbol of faithfulness, suggests connection and relationship. Here, in one of the most distinctive environments, it is not in the desert or the bush that contemporary Australian find their sense of place and belonging.'4 1 Rick Amor, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 1-20 August 1985 2 Rick Amor, conversation with the author, 15 August 2015. All subsequent Amor quotes are taken from this source. 3 Gary Catalano, The Solitary Watcher: Rick Amor and his art, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2001 4 Patrick McCaughey, Strange Country: why Australian painting matters, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2014, pp.339-330 Mossgreen is grateful to Rick Amor for his assistance with the cataloguing of this work.
• Estimate:
  A$100,000 - 120,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.