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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Lowenstein Collection of Modern & Contemporary Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  07 Mar 2017 ~ 6pm
• Lot #:
  28
• Lot Description:
  Garry Shead
  (born 1942)
  Thirroul Morning, 1994
  oil on board
  90.5 x 120.5 cm
  signed lower left: Garry Shead; titled verso: THIRROUL MORNING
• References:
  Sasha Grishin, Accounting for Taste: the Lowensteins Arts Management Collection, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2013, p. 25 (illustrated)
• Notes:
  Morning Thirroul, 1994 is a classic example from Garry Shead’s early D.H. Lawrence series of paintings – arguably the artist’s most recognised and collectable 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 encountered 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. Excited by this discovery, Shead immersed himself in Lawrence’s novels, soon discovering that Lawrence, and his wife Frieda, had visited Australia for three months in 1922. Indeed, the couple had passed most of that time in a bungalow, ‘Wyewurk’, in Thirroul, where Lawrence drafted his manuscript for Kangaroo – his great Australian novel. In a singular episode, Shead initially, almost prematurely, approached the subject of Lawrence at Thirroul in 1971-2. The resulting pictures culminated in a unique collaboration with his friend Brett Whitely, producing the diptych Lawrence, Wyewurk and Thirroul, 1972 (University of Western Australia, Perth). Then, for two decades, the D.H. Lawrence theme remained dormant. In the meantime, Shead continued painting abstract desert landscapes, scenes centred around horseracing, and mostly uninspiring cityscapes in a realist style. The shift in tide came in 1987, when he and his late wife, Judit, moved to Bundeena, just 50 kilometers north of Thirroul. The move rekindled his earlier interest in Lawrence, leading to a new pictorial series around 1992. In that first Wollongong exhibition, art historian Joanna Mendelssohn noted the formal developments in Shead’s new series: ‘Where the earlier paintings were a largely unpopulated landscape, 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’s account what Sidney Nolan had seen in the figure of Ned Kelly – a dramatic story cast in mythical and surreal light, following the trials and tribulations of the characters; a story which could only be expressed against the backdrop of a classic Australian backdrop. Unlike Nolan’s original Kelly series, however, Shead’s Lawrence paintings do not read like a narrative and the individual plots are rarely made explicit or clear. Are the two reoccurring protagonists on this verandah Lawrence and Frieda? Or do they represent Garry and Judit? Perhaps both – suggesting a Picassoan aptitude for fusing literary invention with autobiographical reference. Are we to read the native fauna which come visit the two guests at their verandah, as characters in Lawrence’s Kangaroo? Sasha Grishin has advised against 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 […] 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 The series is made of up of many, interconnected, woven narratives and imaginary associations and may never been understood in whole. Perhaps it is precisely their illusive nature 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, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1993, p. 14
• Estimate:
  A$90,000 - 120,000
• 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.