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Lot #32 - Colin McCahon

  • Auction House:
    Mossgreen-Webb's
  • Sale Name:
    Important Paintings & Contemporary Art
  • Sale Date:
    11 Apr 2017 ~ 6.30pm (NZ time)
  • Lot #:
    32
  • Lot Description:
    Colin McCahon
    Kauri
    acrylic on board, 1965
    750mm x 500mm
    signed McCahon, inscribed Kauri and dated Sept 65 in brushpoint lower left; original John Leech Gallery label verso
  • References:
    Colin McCahon database www.mccahon.co.nz, reference cm0001536.
  • Notes:
    This elegantly minimal work is one of an unexpected group of three, of similar size and imagery, in which, in 1965, Colin McCahon revisited the 'kauri' theme that had dominated his work between 1953 and 1959. In 1953, McCahon and his family moved from Christchurch to a small cottage near French Bay in Titirangi. There were dozens of young kauri growing on their property and the surrounding Waitakere hills were covered in them a regenerating forest gradually recovering from the devastation of decades of intensive logging (and now, of course, threatened by the deadly 'die-back' phenomenon). As a South Islander, McCahon had never seen kauri before and immediately became preoccupied with the majestic trees, from skinny 'rickers' to forest giants, as a new subject for his art. Over the next few years, he made dozens of works (more than 50) focusing on the kauri: some of individual trees, others of whole hillsides. This preoccupation came to a sudden end when the McCahons moved from Titirangi to the inner city (Newton) early in 1960. What prompted McCahon to revisit this theme temporarily in the mid-1960s (there are a couple of other kauri works in 1967) is not known. In style, they are very different from the works of the 1950s. All three 1965 works are white on black; each consists of a thin trunk (designated by two white lines) running from bottom to top of the picture and a single thin branch extends from each trunk. All three also include a circular motif at the bottom. In representational terms, this may represent the spherical cones of the kauri but, in effect, is almost entirely abstract. The present work is the most strictly minimal of the three. McCahon was familiar with zanne's famous dictum treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the conebut, in works such as this, he goes even further, reducing his pictorial grammar to two colours, white and black, and two shapes, straight lines and circles. It is as if he was seeing how far he could reduce the elements of his art while still retaining a modicum of reference to the phenomenal world. It is this daring reductiveness, this austerely refined simplicity, which is most likely to appeal to viewers today. PETER SIMPSON
  • Estimate:
    NZ$100,000 - 130,000
  • 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.



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