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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian & International Art
• Sale Date:
  29 Aug 2016 ~ 6.30pm - Part 1 (Lots 1 - 78)
  30 Aug 2016 ~ 2.30pm - Part 2 (Lots 79 - 328)
• Lot #:
  29
• Lot Description:
  Garry Shead
  (born 1942)
  The Landlord (1992)
  oil on board
  45 x 60 cm
  signed lower left: Garry Shead; titled verso: THE LANDLORD
• Provenance:
  Private collection, Queensland
• References:
  RELATED WORK: Envoy III, oil on canvas, (sold $156,000, Deutscher-Menzies 13 June 2009, private collection)
• Notes:
  The Landlord, 1992 is part of Garry Shead's major D.H. Lawrence series of paintings - arguably the artist's most recognised and collected body of work. The ensemble was first exhibited in the Wollongong Art Gallery in 1992. Variations of the exhibition were then shown at Solander Gallery, Canberra; Michael Nagy Fine Art, Sydney; Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide; Lyall Burton Gallery, Melbourne; Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane; as well as at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Shead first came across the work of D.H. Lawrence in 1968 during a trip to New Guinea. There, he came across a thumbed copy of the collected letters of the English novelist. He became immediately enthused and immersed himself in Lawrence's novels, soon discovering that in 1922, the writer and his wife Frieda had visited Australia for three months. They had passed most of that time in a bungalow named 'Wyewurk' in Thirroul, where Lawrence drafted his manuscript for Kangaroo - his great Australian novel. Shead initially approached the subject of Lawrence at Thirroul in 1972. The resulting pictures culminated in a unique collaboration with his friend Brett Whiteley, producing the diptych Lawrence, Wyewurk and Thirroul, 1975 (collection: University of Western Australia, Perth). Then, for the following two decades, the D.H. Lawrence theme would remain dormant. In the meantime, Shead continued on painting abstracted desert landscapes, scenes centered around horse racing, and mostly uninspired cityscapes in a realist style. In 1987, however, he and his late wife, Judith, moved to Bundeena, just 50 kilometers north of Thirroul. The move reigniting his earlier interest in Lawrence, and thus embarking on a new series of works around 1992. In the Wollongong exhibition catalogue, Art historian Joanna Mendelssohn noted the formal developments in Shead's new series: 'Where the earlier paintings were a largely unpopulated landscapes, he now has filled his landscapes with the figures of Lawrence and Frieda and larger than life animals and birds It is a magical landscape, this south coast paradise. Shead has painted a place where dreams might come true, and where innocence and experience become one.'1 Shead had found in Lawrence what Sidney Nolan had discovered in Ned Kelly, and what Arthur Boyd had taken out of his own mythologies for the Bride series - a dramatic story cast in mythical light, following the trials and tribulations of the characters; a story which could only be expressed against the backdrop of the quintessential Australian landscape. Unlike Nolan's Kelly series, however, Shead's Lawrence paintings do not read like a narrative and the meanings are rarely made explicit. Are the protagonists D.H. Lawrence and Frieda? Are we looking at Shead and his wife Judith who posed for the female figure in all the works? Or, are we to interpret the native animals, which visit the two couple at their verandah, as characters in Lawrence's novel Kangaroo? Sasha Grishin has warned of trying to make sense of it all when he wrote that the works are made up of 'a constantly changing fabric of ambiguity, with the blurring of identities and a complex pattern of inter-relationships is a feature of the paintings and cautions against an over-zealous literal interpretation. Not only are the figures ambiguous in their identity, but so too is their main adversary, the Kangaroo. The Kangaroo, which appears in almost all of the paintings, is more of a presence than an identifiable character. The ubiquitous Kangaroo at times could be interpreted as Benjamin Cooley, whom Sommers (of the novel) confesses to love because their souls are somewhat alike, but whom he does not want to love; at other times it seems to be the personification of the spirit of the place, a spirit which belongs to the land and which stalks these alien intruders.'2 Perhaps the series is made of up of many, interconnected, woven narratives and imaginary associations and will never been completely understood. Perhaps, therein lies their seductive qualities which make these works among the most captivating of all Shead's work. Petrit Abazi 1 Joanna Mendelssohn, D.H. Lawrence: Paintings by Garry Shead, Wollongong City Gallery, 1992 2 Sasha Grishin, Garry Shead: The D.H. Lawrence Paintings, Craftsmen House, Sydney, 1993, p. 14
• Estimate:
  A$28,000 - 35,000
• 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.