Patrick Heron

Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by the present owner, 12th December 1990

Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Patrick Heron, Recent Paintings, 9th January - 28th March 1990;
Sydney, Rex Irwin, Patrick Heron, 9th - 28th April 1990, un-numbered exhibition;
London, Waddington Galleries, Patrick Heron, Sydney Paintings and Gouaches 1989-1990, 27th March - 20th April 1991, cat. no.11;
London, Tate, Patrick Heron, 25th June - 6th September 1998, cat. no.63, illustrated.

Modern Painters, Vol. 6, Spring 1993, illustrated p.11;
Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, London, 1994, illustrated p.235;
Patrick Heron - Early Paintings 1945 - 1955, Waddington Galleries, (exh. cat.), London, 2000, illustrated p.11.

Original canvas. There are one or two extremely minor possible losses or slight flatteninings to the extreme tips of elements of the raised impasto, only visible upon extremely close inspection. This excepting the work appears in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. Housed in a thin strip frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The Estate of Patrick Heron is preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the Artist's work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to The Estate of Patrick Heron, c/o Modern & Post-War British Art, Sotheby's, 34-35 New Bond Street, London, W1A 2AA or email at modbrit@sothebys.com

‘I had a wonderful time [in Australia] in 1989-90... It wasn’t so much the landscape as the vegetation that got into the work. The flora of Australia I simply adore, but of course I was already in love with that sort of thing through this garden [at Eagle’s Nest] with its Australian and New Zealand shrubs...’
(The Artist, quoted in David Sylvester (ed.), Patrick Heron, Tate, London, (exh. cat.), 1998, p.44)

Heron spent four months in Sydney as artist-in-residence at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from November 1989 to February 1990. This was his third visit to Australia having travelled there in 1967 to judge the Perth Festival All Australian Painting Competition and in 1973, when he was invited to give the 6^th Power Lecture in Contemporary art at the Power Institute of Fine Art at the University of Sydney and he delivered his seminal lecture The Shape of Colour. On each visit he had been bowled over by the scintillating Antipodean light and the cacophony of exotic plants and flowers, pulsating with previously unseen shades of colour. This visit was no different: his daily walk through Sydney’s Botanical Gardens to the artist’s studio at the Art Gallery of New South Wales above the Woolloomoolloo Creek of Sydney Harbour brought about a joyous response in his work. In the sixteen weeks he spent as artist-in-residence (he managed to extend his initial one month sojourn three times), he completed a prodigious corpus of work - 46 large gouaches and six large canvases in what was one of the most prolific periods of his career. Many of these paintings were lost in the devastating fire at Momart storage in 2004 and the emergence of Sydney Garden Painting: February 1990: I onto the open market is a rare opportunity to experience the magnificent power of this important body of work.

The energetic fervour which his new environment brought on is exemplified by the dynamic handling and bold colour combinations of the present work. Throughout the 1980s, Heron had already been developing away from the more controlled brush work and surface texture of his so-called wobbly hard-edge paintings from previous decades where relatively small brushes were painstakingly used to cover large expanses of colour. In Sydney Garden Painting: February 1990: I, a riot of both colour and brushwork explodes from the canvas -  the use of lilacs, pinks and mauves offset with yellow and deep aqua tones of green and blue are explicitly more exotic than even his boldest work inspired by the stark bright Cornish light. Moreover, unlike the measured gestures of work from previous decades where he sought to achieve a consistency of texture across the surface, here, the surface is characterised by the very opposite – a plethora of textures flash across the composition highlighting the actuality of the paint itself: oil has literally been squeezed directly from the tube whilst brush strokes writhe across the surface and dazzling areas of white canvas peep through, enlivening the entire composition with such aplomb.