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• Auction House:
  Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Vision Series
• Sale Date:
  24 Nov 2015 ~ 6.30pm (NZ time)
• Lot #:
  61*
• Lot Description:
  Jeffrey Harris
  Two Figures in a Landscape
  oil on canvas
  1825mm x 3645mm
  c. 1987
• Notes:
  Two interwoven motifs are visible throughout the varied body of work undertaken by Jeffrey Harris since he started his career as an artist in 1970: landscapes and people. In an interview conducted in 1981, Harris described his frequent use of these motifs: “it’s never just the landscape. My landscapes are always populated. And it’s normally the people in it who give the picture meaning.” However, subsequent to a move to Melbourne in 1986, the influence of Australian neo-expressionism caused Harris to reconsider the importance of his figures and initiate an ambitious series of large paintings, which, instead, focus on the bright, interwoven fields of colour that had previously been relegated to describing the landscape backgrounds of his paintings. This work was completed during his time living in Melbourne, and Harris has given the abstract and the figurative elements of Two Figures in a Landscape equal treatment: a woman, distorted to mirror the contours of a stream of grey behind her, floats above a man in the process of being submerged by encroaching patches of brushwork. Surrounding them, vaguely recognisable objects devolve into geometric shapes, melting into the background that supports them. The psychological space described by the body of works to which Two Figures in a Landscape belongs seems to be jettisoning the figures that inhabit it, flushing them out of its system by way of an intense cocktail of vivid colours and wide, painterly abstract gestures. SIMON BOWERBANK
• Estimate:
  NZ$15,000 - 25,000
• 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.