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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 #:
  38
• Lot Description:
  Stieg Persson
  (born 1959)
  Fiction 1985
  oil and blackboard paint on canvas
  143 x 102 cm
• Provenance:
  Yuill Crowley Gallery, Sydney 1987
• Notes:
  For Stieg Persson, the early 1980s was a key period in his development as a painter. In 1981 he received his Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, followed by his first solo exhibition at United Artists Gallery in 1983. The following year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York promptly acquired Rosebud 1983 for its permanent collection through Manhattan's CDS Gallery that was showing Persson's work at the time. This succs d'estime led to an annual showing of his art at the Yuill Crowley Gallery in Sydney where he would be a stable artist until 1991. By 1987 his precocious rise paved the way for the first non-commercial solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, followed by another at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1996, and later, Backmasking: The Art of Stieg Persson which toured Bendigo, Wangaratta, Hamilton and Glen Eira in 2001-02. His critical acclaim was sustained and reinforced when, in the following year, he was judged as the winner of the $50,000 Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize awarded by Bendigo Art Gallery. His inclusion in the recent 'Melbourne Now' exhibition was a clear indication that Persson, although part of an 'older' guard, is very much in tune with the cultural, social and artistic context in which he operates. Fiction 1985 was included in Persson's first exhibition with Yuill Crowley Gallery. It was also Persson's first exhibition in Sydney, and despite the cultural rivalry between the two cities, his art was very well received, 'injecting some welcome vitality into Sydney's commercial galleries'1 recorded Arthur McIntyre. The predominantly black-on-black and white canvases gave way to many different interpretations, but it is evident that Persson was preoccupied with pushing referential elements to the limit through abstraction and colour values. If anything, Fiction 1985 is a nod to the art historical canon of the golden spiral and perhaps also to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty 1970 in Salt Lake City. 1 Arthur McIntyre, 'Persson has a black-and-white romance with death', The Age, 11 April 1985, p.14
• Estimate:
  A$3,000 - 5,000
• 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.