Find Lots

• Auction House:
  Deutscher and Hackett
• Sale Name:
  Modern + Contemporary Fine Art - Timed Online Auction
• Sale Date:
  06 May 2020 ~ Bidding ends at 7pm (AEST)
• Lot #:
  11
• Lot Description:
  Tim Storrier
  (born 1949)
  Blaze Line
  synthetic polymer paint and rope on canvas
  76.5 x 183.0 cm
  signed lower right: Storrier
• Provenance:
  Eva Breuer Art Dealer, Sydney; Private collection, Sydney; Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 28 April 2010, lot 63; Private collection, Melbourne
• Notes:
  Paradoxically one of the country’s most popular yet elusive artists, Tim Storrier first captured the imagination of the art world during the eighties with his acclaimed ‘point to point’ paintings featuring suspended ropes set ablaze against a dramatic black ground or parched desert landscape. Such signature images, exemplified superbly by 'Blaze Line', not only invoke fire as an elemental force, with its powerful symbolism of regeneration, ritual and renewal. More importantly perhaps, they attest to Storrier’s enduring fascination in the concept of the seemingly endless horizon and his experimentation with three dimensional constructions of wire, rope and steel which he would install in remote outback locations and subsequently ignite, capturing the entire staged event on cibachrome film. As art historian Murray Cree elucidates, ‘When Tim Storrier first strung a piece of rope between two poles and set it alight, he had no idea that he was opening a creative seam that would sustain his work for decades: a seam rich in concepts and images relating to the distance between two points and the rope as a defining and tensioning device between these points’.1 Deriving their impetus primarily from these ‘performances’, the paintings which ensued thus explore an iconic image whose atmospheric resonance differs widely depending upon elements of light, action and stillness. Real and imagined are disorientingly merged to construct a highly personal landscape that is imbued with the ‘myth of the outback’; as Storrier himself muses, ‘The idea of those horizons is something I still find challenging and rather wonderful. But again it is my view; it is not the reality of the farmer or the people that live there. It is a mythical quotient that had probably gone. As with Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalous, the painting is a myth’.2 Drawing upon memory and intuition to forge a potent symbol of place, not surprisingly Storrier has been compared to artists such as Streeton and Roberts who fused the actuality of the Australian bush with a sense of poetry, and Nolan and Drysdale who, realising the Australian outback as a vast and uncompromising landscape, pursued theatrical possibilities for creating a distinct and identifiable consciousness.3 In his contemplation of the relative insignificance of humankind 'vis a vis' the awesome magnitude of the natural world, Storrier’s art also bears strong affinities with the European tradition of romantic landscape painting, and specifically, Constable and Turner with their ‘great big skies, endless horizons and the air you can cut with a knife – thick with moisture’.4 Long-contemplated narratives inspired by the artist’s own physical and emotional experience of the landscape, indeed works such as 'Blaze Line' feature among the most recognisable images in contemporary art today – evoking a sense of place that is unequivocally Australian. As Edmund Capon, a former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales elucidates, ‘…they could not I believe have come from any country other than Australia’.5 1. Murray Cree, L., 'Dust and Ashes', Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 2003; 2. Storrier cited in Hart, D., ‘The Australian Context: Real and Imagined’, 'Tim Storrier: Burning of the Gifts', Australian Galleries, Sydney, 1989, p. 19; 3. Hart, ibid., p. 18; 4. Hart, ibid., p. 19; 5. Capon, E., cited in Lumby, C., 'Tim Storrier: The Art of the Outsider', Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 8 VERONICA ANGELATOS
• Estimate:
  A$65,000 - 85,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

  Can't see the realised price? Upgrade your subscription now!

• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.