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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 #:
  45
• Lot Description:
  Jan Senbergs
  (born 1939)
  Aurora to Starboard II 1988
  oil on canvas
  151 x 182 cm
  signed and dated 'Jan Senbergs 1988' lower right; titled and dated on Powell Street Gallery label verso
• Provenance:
  Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne 1988
• Exhibited:
  Nocturne: Images of Night and Darkness from Colonial to Contemporary, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, 23 April - 16 June 2002; Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, 5 July - 1 September 2002
• Notes:
  Jan Senbergs was born in Latvia and arrived in Australia in 1950. He has exhibited regularly since the 1960s and has had major solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2008), Deakin University Art Gallery (2011) and the Australian Print Workshop (2012). He frequently depicts industrial landscapes, but also unsullied and remote ones, such as Antarctica, inspired during a memorable voyage. The Australian Antarctic Division invited artists and other professionals, including Senbergs, Bea Maddock and John Caldwell, to join them on the vessel 'Icebird' on their annual re-supply voyage to Antarctica (Voyage Six) in January and February 1987. Senbergs' Voyage Six - Antarctica solo exhibition at the Powell Street Gallery in Melbourne in 1988 was the creative culmination of his Antarctic adventure and comprised eight lithographs, twenty-two paintings and some drawings. The exhibition was critically well received. In the artist's words, "Before leaving the continent, 'Icebird' visited the Russian base of Mirny for an Antarctic Treaty Inspection. Besides the official contact, a keenly anticipated activity was the bartering of Scotch whisky for the prized Russian felt hats - a sensible cultural exchange. The paintings Aurora to Starboard (1) and (2) are a record of that phenomenon on a clear and starry night on the return to Hobart."1 Patrick McCaughey, who wrote a major tome on the work of Senbergs in 2006, commented that the artist's Antarctic body of work "contains a greater range of theme, viewpoint and type of painting than any earlier series...[it] has an inner logic, a comprehensiveness and emotional unity, that makes it one of the most outstanding groups in his entire oeuvre."2 The two Aurora paintings represent the final, return, stage of Senbergs' Antarctic journey. They are futuristic, surreal, other-worldly. McCaughey opined: The spectacular and deliberately primitive manner of both paintings deliberately contrasts with the pair of paintings depicting the voyage out, where mountainous seas had threatened the Icebird. Now the mission is complete; the meaning and significance of the destination gleaned so the ship can turn for home and the seas recede beneath her hull. The sweep of the aurora is like a corona, a sign of blessing in their wake. Dr Shireen Huda 1 Jan Senbergs in Jan Senbergs: Voyage Six - Antarctica, Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne, 1988, p. 9 2 Patrick McCaughey, Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006, p.116 3 ibid, p.134
• Estimate:
  A$10,000 - 15,000
• 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.