Robert Macpherson

Yuill Crowley Gallery, Sydney
The Austcorp Group Limited Art Collection; purchased from the above

These panels are all in good original condition. There is a 1cm area of paint loss on the lower right hand edge on panel two and a small area of paint loss on the lower right hand corner on panel four.
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Robert MacPherson is one of Australia's most respected contemporary artists, with a career spanning well over 30 years and extensive representation in major exhibitions and collections; a comprehensive survey was mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in 2001.

His work expresses a literate international-modernist sensibility in its references to Greenbergian concern for 'pure' painting, to the reductive forms of Russian Constructivism and American Minimalism, to the material improvisations of Arte Povera, to the serial repetitions of conceptual art, to the semiotic intensity of concrete poetry. At the same time it is resolutely local and vernacular, reflecting the artist's rural Queensland origins. His immediate themes and subjects include drovers and stockmen, threatened frog species, fishing and used cars, while his materials range from housepaint and masonite to beehives, birdhouses and blankets. This combination or collision of contrary aesthetics produces work which is simultaneously elegant and gauche, austere and funny, hermetic and democratic.

Since the 1990s Macpherson has produced a broken series known as the Mayfair paintings, named in honour of his favourite Brisbane sandwich bar. Like other sequences, the Mayfair works are inspired by hand-painted roadside signage, in this particular case signs relating to food. Some of these works are text-based ('sweet and tasty', 'firm and ripe', 'fresh and fruity'); others, such as the present work, are based on amateur advertising images of fruit and vegetables. Mayfair: September vertical orange in memory of EMM comprises a set of four near-identical paintings. Fat carrots or flat abstractions, these orange squashed ellipses are balanced on their narrow ends on the bottom edges of the support, while their 'foliage' explodes in rough green brushstrokes to the top edge. Formally imposing, strangely beautiful and quite daft, the present work is a particularly resonant and handsome example of Macpherson's puzzling, poet art.