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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The John Buckley Collection of Modern & Contemporary Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  13 May 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  17
• Lot Description:
  Paul Partos
  (1943-2002)
  Untitled (Black) 1982
  oil on canvas
  214 x 198 cm
  signed, titled and dated verso
• Notes:
  Born in Bratislava, Paul Partos arrived in Perth in 1950 before moving to Melbourne six months later. Encouraged by his father to study advertising, he enrolled in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1959 and eventually completed his Fine Arts degree in 1962. Partos was in good company at RMIT, alongside his colleagues George Baldessin, Gareth Samsom and John Buckley. However, he disliked the formal training which he found suppressed his natural tendencies towards pure abstraction and conceptual art, while many of the exams at the institute tested the students on their ability to compose figurative and landscape compositions1. Like Robert Jacks, Partos would hold his first exhibition at Gallery A in Melbourne in 1965. Heralded a success, his first canvases of abstracted female figures recalled the art brut of Jean Dubuffet, the quasi cubist profiles of Pablo Picasso, the abstract expressionist energy of Willem de Kooning's 'Women' and the twisted portraits of Francis Bacon. Upon extended sojourns in Europe and New York, Partos would abandon this expressionist visual language by 1972 and his conceptual art was then distinguished by a cool analytical nature before settling into the square and rectangle format paintings which he developed over the last two decades of his life. In this long and final series of works, Robert Lindsay saw 'a return to the initial problem of making marks on a canvas'2. These vibrant and gestural marks, which recall automatism in surreal art, are applied with thick impasto, creating an almost sculptural quality to the expressive surface. In Untitled (Black) they actually enhance the balance and order in an otherwise abstract composition and reveal how for Partos, painting was more than just a way of communication; it was a medium of meditative, compulsive and repetitive action. 1 Interview with James Gleeson, National Gallery of Australia Archives, 3 November 1979, p.3 2 Robert Lindsay, Project 16: Paul Partos, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1977, p.3
• Estimate:
  A$18,000 - 25,000
• 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.