Find Lots

• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The John Buckley Collection of Modern & Contemporary Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  13 May 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  7
• Lot Description:
  Rosalie Norah King Gascoigne
  (1917-1999)
  Feathered Chairs 1978
  weathered painted steel chairs with cormorant feathers
  110 x 50 x 50 cm (each unit); Custom-made crate accompanies the chairs
• Provenance:
  Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane 1979
• Exhibited:
  Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane, 1979; Off the Wall in the Air, a Seventies' Selection, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 28 June - 4 August 1991; Monash University Gallery, 3 July - 10 August 1991; Rosalie Gascoigne, City Gallery, Wellington, 2004; Backward Glance - Important Work from the 1980s, John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne, 18 July 2007; Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, 19 December 2008 - 15 March 2009
• References:
  Dianne Byrne, The Australian, 21 June 1979; Mary Eagle (ed.), From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, 2000, p.53 (illustrated); Greg O'Brien in Rosalie Gascoigne Plain Air, City Gallery, Wellington, 2004, pp.35, 56; Richard Kalina, Art in America, October 2005, p.85 (illustrated); Kelly Gellatly, Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008; Ray Edgar, Landscape Architecture Australia, no. 122, May 2009 p.40 (illustrated); Sunday Canberra Times, 6 Novemb
• Notes:
  Canberra-artist Rosalie Gascoigne had a talent for creating Ikebana-like, landscape-inspired art works from found objects - she had an eye for the simplicity of beauty. She became an artist rather late in life; her first solo exhibition was in 1974 at Macquarie Galleries, Canberra, at the age of 57. However, institutional respect soon followed and she was given a major survey show at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1978. Feathered Chairs is one of her more unusual and striking pieces, created in January 1978. She wrote about the inspiration for and the construction of this work in a letter to her son, Martin: "I have happened upon a new artwork (I think). Two of those reddish iron chairs decked with racks of black feathers. Accidental juxtaposition really...But about 100 feathers in each rack - and it reads right. Has presence. Two chairs make a set. Mildred [Kirk] sees them as two thrones. James Gleeson laughed delightedly."1 Gascoigne later recalled how she happened to discover the feathers at Lake George: And then I came to this place where there were all these [water tanks] ... black birds, you know, cormorant...And a shattering of black beautiful glossy [feathers] as if the birds had just undressed...I thought, I've got to have those, those are good...And that's where I made this [shows a photograph of Feathered Chairs]...John Buckley's got that in his private house. They're beautiful feathers. They're like the underside of mushrooms. You know, the quill. And I had those chairs which I had found discarded from the CSIRO... 2 Gascoigne's eye for detail, attention to structure and what Sydney curator, Nick Waterlow, referred to as haute pastiche, is demonstrated by the construction of the racks for holding the feathers; a technique employed in both Feathered Fence 1978-79 and Feathered Chairs. This technique was developed by her husband, Ben, who inserted the quill ends between the slats and then tightened the nuts so they were held in parallel. Chicken-wire strands were then soldered together wherever they crossed, which provided enough support for the weight.3 Feathered Fence 1978-79 is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia and was exhibited as early as 1979 in the Biennale of Sydney. In 1982, Gascoigne and Peter Booth represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. Her work is included in major public, corporate and private collections and was the subject of a significant retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2008. Dr Shireen Huda 1 Rosalie Gascoigne, Letters to Martin in Mary Eagle (ed.), From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, 2000, entry from 28 January 1978 2 Rosalie Gascoigne with Ian North, 9 February 1982, transcript, National Gallery of Australia Research Library 3 S.C.B. Gascoigne, "The Artist-in-Residence", in Eagle, op. cit., p.11
• Estimate:
  A$60,000 - 100,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

  Can't see the realised price? Upgrade your subscription now!

• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.