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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 #:
  20
• Lot Description:
  Imants Alfred Tillers
  (born 1950)
  Das Napoleonspiel 1983
  synthetic polymer paint on 100 canvas board panels
  25 x 38 cm (each panel), 254 x 380 cm (overall)
• Provenance:
  Reconnaissance Gallery, Melbourne 1983
• Exhibited:
  Reconnaissance Gallery, Melbourne 1983; An Australian Accent: Three Artists - Mike Parr, Imants Tillers, Ken Unsworth, P.S.1 (Project Studios One), The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Inc., New York, 15 April - 10 June 1984 (illustrated)
• Notes:
  Das Napoleonspiel (or The Napoleon Game) by Imants Tillers was included in the P.S.1 (Project Studios One) exhibition, An Australian Accent: Three Artists - Mike Parr, Imants Tillers, Ken Unsworth, in 1984. Organised by John Kaldor, this exhibition essentially introduced Australian art to an American audience. Said Kaldor, "The three artists in this exhibition show a maturity of expression and an originality of style that reveals a new authority in Australian art. Each artist in his own right represents the best in Australia...this should be viewed...equally as three one-man exhibitions..."1 One of the most noticeable things about this monumental work is the dramatic sense of movement and the child-like vibrancy of colour. Das Napoleonspiel also shares some iconography with Pataphysical Man, 1984, displayed in the same P.S.1 exhibition and in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales since 1985. The figure of the boy in both paintings was appropriated from a Latvian book of folk tales called The White Book (Balta Gramata) by Janis Jaunsudrabins and reflects Tillers' ethnic heritage (although he was born in Sydney). Das Napoleonspiel was one of the earliest works created after Tillers developed his technique of painting on small canvas boards and slotting them together like a mosaic or puzzle. These works all disassemble into a stack of tiles (small canvases) for ease of storage and transport and presented a logistically-convenient way for Tillers to create large-scale works in a small studio. The canvas board works are all individually and consecutively numbered. Tillers builds up layers on his paintings and "...equates this accretion of images, one over the other (and the serial juxtaposition of fragments in the composition as a whole), with the random shower of information that we all experience daily. In his view, that cumulative implosion of images dominates contemporary life."2 Tillers has held a number of group and solo exhibitions overseas, including Documenta 7 in Germany in 1982, the Venice Biennale in 1986, Avant-Garde in the Eighties in Los Angeles in 1987 and the survey exhibition, Imants Tillers: Works 1978-1988, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1988. A major survey of his paintings was more recently held at the National Gallery of Australia in 2006, Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions. Dr Shireen Huda 1 John Kaldor, An Australian Accent: Three Artists - Mike Parr, Imants Tillers, Ken Unsworth, P.S.1 (Project Studios One), The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Inc., New York, 1984, p.8 2 Jonathan Fineberg, "A Critical Examination of the Artists' Current Work from an International Perspective", in An Australian Accent, op. cit., p.25
• Estimate:
  A$20,000 - 30,000
• 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.