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Lot #67 - Tim Storrier

  • Auction House:
    Mossgreen
  • Sale Name:
    The Lowenstein Collection of Modern & Contemporary Australian Art
  • Sale Date:
    07 Mar 2017 ~ 6pm
  • Lot #:
    67
  • Lot Description:
    Tim Storrier
    (born 1949)
    Still Life and Fire, 1990
    acrylic on paper
    101 x 152 cm
    signed, dated and titled lower right: Storrier 1990 Still Life & Fire
  • Provenance:
    Fischer Fine Art Ltd, London
  • References:
    Sasha Grishin, Accounting for Taste: the Lowensteins Arts Management Collection, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2013, p. 230 (illustrated)
  • Notes:
    Tim Storrier has sustained a remarkably long, productive and successful career as an artist. His rise was precocious. In 1968, at just nineteen, he was awarded the Sulman Prize for his painting Suzy 350 – a prize he would reclaim in 1984 with The Burn. In 2012 his fluency in portraiture was recognised when he was awarded the much-coveted Archibald Prize with his self-portrait the Histrionic Wayfarer (after Bosch). More recently he won the Packing Room prize for his 2014 Archibald submission. Art historian Deborah Hart summed up the artist’s work rather well when she wrote: ‘Tim Storrier’s art combines great technical finesse with a sense of theatricality and the creation of illusory worlds. Since the 1970s the landscape has been his stage set for isolated dwellings and constructions as well as still life. These in turn are the performers and signposts, which provide the point of identification for emotions and experience. In unison with the backdrop they act out the performance which is primarily about the creation of atmosphere and is ultimately linked with the inner world of the imagination and identification with place.’1 A key to this success has been his reinterpretation of the Australian still-life, or the still life in an Australian landscape. In the present work, among other things, we see a burning piece of meat. This was also used in Sulman Prize winning work The Burn which Storrier once explained: ‘I chose the carcase as a symbol of a flayed body. It was a really graphic image of the way I felt. I hadn’t used the flame in relation to the carcase before. At the time of painting I cannot say that I was aware of the intellectual motivation of it … at the time it wasn’t so clearly defined.’2 Catherine Lumby, the artist’s biographer noted that ‘the role of the still life in Storrier’s oeuvre surfaced fully in the mid-1980s following a trip to Egypt to paint a series of commissioned images.’3 He later painted Burning of the Gifts which ‘depicted a pyre made of melons, eels, snakes, pomegranates and watermelons smouldering ominously in an empty landscape […] The still life’, continues Lamby, ‘is an ideal genre for Storrier to balance a mannered style with submerged symbolic content.’4 Petrit Abazi 1 Deborah Hart, Tim Storrier: burning the gifts, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1989, p. 7 2 Tim Storrier, cited in Ibid., p. 9 3 Catherine Lumby, Tim Storrier: the art of the outsider, Craftsman House, 2000, Sydney, p 46 4 Ibid.
  • Estimate:
    A$35,000 - 45,000
  • 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.



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