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• Auction House:
  Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Important Paintings and Contemporary Art
• Sale Date:
  06 Dec 2011 ~ 6.30pm (NZ Time)
• Lot #:
  52
• Lot Description:
  Milan Mrkusich
  The immaculate surface of this canvas and the refinement of the painted structure identify Untitled Dark as a mature work by Milan Mrkusich. Painted i
  acrylic on stretched canvas
  1600mm x 1600mm
  signed Mrkusich, dated 1985 and inscribed Untitled Dark in pencil verso upper edge
• Notes:
  The immaculate surface of this canvas and the refinement of the painted structure identify Untitled Dark as a mature work by Milan Mrkusich. Painted in the fourth decade of his career as an artist and seventeen years following the first of his colourfield Monochrome series, this large painting is part of the logical and constant development seen in Mrkusich's oeuvre. Dark paintings are notoriously difficult both for the artist and the viewer, with Mrkusich himself claiming, 'it is very difficult to make black or darkness work'. Yet in spite of the difficulties what becomes apparent in viewing Untitled Dark is that the simplicity of the unambiguous squared format is in perfect balance with the restricted colour: Mrkusich makes darkness work. The schema for this iconic dark painting is an uncomplicated geometric structure of colour and form, the enveloping darkness shadowing the formal relations of squareness. The soft qualities of colour are restricted to three shades of subtly varying but sumptuous darkness in three separate blocks: one large upper rectangle in a darkened mauve with two squares below, the left a dark earthy tone alongside a much more saturated and weightier tone of near black. Peter Leech, when discussing Mrkusich's dark paintings in Art New Zealand, said of them, In the dark, of course, formal definition and outline blur. The eyes see only the vaguest relations of intensity and saturation of darkness. This is the case in Untitled Dark, where the tones are all variations in the dark and consideration of them is only able to be in terms of that darkness, of their being more of a blueish darkness, a brownish or even a charcoal darkness. Colour relations have always been a focus and source of vigour in Mrkusich's painting and so it is in Untitled Dark, even with its restricted and darkened palette and mathematically restrained structure. There is always a perceptual to-ing and fro-ing of colours placed next to each other, and in this painting the heavily saturated lower right square lies perceptually in front of those around it, the large upper rectangle more distant. Each carefully built up colour is consistently worked without modulation - technically no mean task given the area of paint - yet the eyes perceive a draining of darkness alongside the saturated weight of the lower right square and to a lesser extent alongside the lower left square, as if there were a luminosity that escapes from the border between the tones. In spite of that the demarcation of the separate areas is not harsh, rather, it is a separation softened by the artist's hand, by his choice of colour. This is not hard-edged geometric abstraction, this is abstraction of the human kind, with the sensations and qualities of the varying shallow depths of the darkened structure both softening the mathematical structure and gently enlivening the painted surface. Given the refinement of Untitled Dark what we see in the opulence of that dark colour structure is the embodiment of technical accomplishment and the certitude of Mrkusich's painting process. CHRISSIECRAIG
• Estimate:
  NZ$40,000 - 60,000
• 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.