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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen-Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Important Paintings and Contemporary Art
• Sale Date:
  07 Aug 2017 ~ 6.30pm (NZST)
• Lot #:
  11
• Lot Description:
  Michael Illingworth
  Untitled
  oil on canvas, 1971
  400mm x 360mm
  signed Michael Illingworth and dated '71 in brushpoint verso
• Provenance:
  From The Kevin and Levanah Croon Collection, Australia, previously Lower Hutt. Purchased by Kevin and Levanah Croon from Peter McLeavey Gallery, 1973.
• Notes:
  One side of Michael Illingworth's painting is satirical: a blistering attack on the false values of society and what he once called 'the hypocritical façade of suburbia', which he symbolised in the personages of Mr and Mrs Thomas Piss-Quick (the title of a 1968 painting). The other side of his painting is celebratory, evoking a world of freedom and sensuality, sometimes explicitly identified with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. In other works, though, as in Untitled, the figures are generic and anonymous. The sexually explicit nature of some of these paintings caused trouble for Illingworth; complaints were made to police, and angry letters denouncing his work appeared in magazines and newspapers. Illingworth himself was unapologetic: The naked and unashamed Adam and Eve are beyond the comprehension of people with clothes hang-ups. Each and every one of our ancestors were the product of phallic energy. For him, the process of painting involved tapping into these sources of primal energy: " I never plan a painting. It unrolls as I go along. It just happens. Most of my paintings are spontaneous gestures. They must come straight from the heart, from the primal being. But this is only one side of the story; to bring a painting to completion was a matter of arduous effort. There is a gradual process of refinement, hours and hours of work until it is finished and then I am utterly exhausted" (These quotations are from A Tourist in Paradise Lost: The Art of Michael Illingworth, Wellington, City Gallery, 2001). Illingworth's Untitled is a joyous celebration of untrammelled bodies and guilt-free sexuality: a very 1970s' vision. These anonymous humanoids, faceless and naked (even headless, in the case of the woman), are identified as male and female only by their sexual organs. They cavort sexily with each other in a sensual but entirely non-pornographic fashion within a generalised setting of cloud, sky and hill. It is a highly curvilinear world that these figures inhabit; the clouds are curvy, the sky is curvy, the hills are curvy and the lovers are curvy. Chins, chests, breasts, tummies, knees and even the penis: there is not a straight line anywhere to be seen. But only a painstaking method could capture such a moment for perpetuity, as did the figures on a Grecian Urn that so fired John Keats' imagination. Illingworth slaved over his pictures, carefully adding layer upon layer of very thin oil paint, slowly building up the surface until it shone with an almost jewel-like intensity. The effect of this exhilarating painting is carefree and uninhibited but the technique of its making is meticulous and time consuming, and, thus, is just the opposite of nakedly galivanting and throwing your limbs about. PETER SIMPSON
• Estimate:
  NZ$50,000 - 70,000
• 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.