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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Australian Art Collection of Sandra Powell & Andrew King
• Sale Date:
  19 Mar 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  35
• Lot Description:
  John Young
  (Born 1956)
  Castiglione's Dream, Summer 1995-96
  digital print, synthetic polymer paint and oil on canvas
  219.5 x 613.6cm (overall); 4 panels, 219.5 x 153.4cm each
  signed and dated to verso on panel 1
• Provenance:
  Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
• Exhibited:
  John Young, Orient/Occident: A Survey of Works 1978-2005, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 6 November 2005 - 2 April 2006; System's End, Oxy Gallery, Osaka; Hakone Open Air Museum, Hakone; Dong An Gallery, Seoul; Kaohsiung Museum of Art, Kaohsiung, 1996; The John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, December 1997 - January 1998 (label to verso);The Hermit Paintings, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 1999
• References:
  William Wright and Takeshi Kanazawa, System's End, 1996; David Wilson 'Young Punk', South China Morning Post, 14 March 2004, p.6; Carolyn Barnes and William Wright, John Young, Craftsman House, Melbourne, 2005, pp. 42-43; 134, 247, cat.149 (illustrated); Carolyn Barnes et al., 'Aesthetics and Memory in the Recent Paintings of John Young' The Bridge and the Fruit Tree - a Survey, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2013, p. 56 (illustrated)
• Notes:
  Castiglione's Dream 1995-6, is a monumental tour de force and an important painting from a key period in the oeuvre of John Young. The art of John Young is an art of in-between. It oscillates comfortably within Eastern and Western visual vocabulary, manual artistic labour and automatic mechanical reproduction, modernist aesthetic paradigms and post modern ambiguity and repetition - especially in the iconography of his works. In reviewing the artist's aesthetic qualities, Dr Carolyn Barnes sees this act of appropriation in Young's art a response to modernist aesthetics - 'a contrast with the emphasis on innovation in modernism, which suggests the preservation and modulation of cultural forms is more consistent with the norm in art history'1. In the current work, the foreground images are made up of banal appropriated pictures of Ingresque nudes, close-ups of lotus flowers and idyllic landscapes, while the background is a largely unmodified reproduction of Giuseppe Castiglione's 18th century painting One Hundred Horses (1728, National Palace Museum, Taipei). A Jesuit missionary, Castiglione served as inspiration for a number of Double Ground paintings. Italian born, he spent much of his life as a practicing artist and architect for Emperor Qianlong in China, and it is interesting to note a number of parallels that can be drawn between Castiglione and Young. Firstly, both artists migrated to new countries with radically different social and visual cultures. They would both go on to work toward an aesthetic that aimed to fuse Eastern and Western artistic styles and imagery. Thirdly, philosophy, whether theological or sectarian, played a major role in the lives of both artists. And finally, both men produced their most striking paintings when working on grand proportions: One Hundred Horses measures close to eight metres in length. A tough critic of his own work, Young has been quoted as saying that, 'a painting I'm proud of actually comes once every ten years'2. With this comment in mind, it is of particular interest to note that the artist ranks Castiglione's Dream 1995-6 as one of his most accomplished and important works3. With an exceptional exhibition history, Castiglione's Dream 1995-6 is arguably the most important painting by John Young to have come up for auction, and Mossgreen is delighted to be entrusted with the sale of this significant work. 1 Carolyn Barnes, 'Aesthetic and Memory in the Recent Paintings of John Young', The Bridge and the Fruit Tree: John Young - A Survey, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, p.55 2 David Wilson, 'Young Punk', South China Morning Post, 14 March 2004, p.6 3 In a communication via e-mail with the author, 8 February, 2014
• Estimate:
  A$60,000 - 80,000
• 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.