Gunter Christmann

The artist
Noela Yuill; purchased from the above in the late 1970s
Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2003

Gunter Christmann, Central Street Gallery, Sydney, 1966
Modern Australian Painting, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 5 - 21 June 2003, cat. 23 (label on reverse)

Elwyn Lynn, 'Gunter Christmann', Art and Australia, vol. 10, no. 3, January 1973, p. 248 (illus.)
Modern Australian Painting, Melbourne: Charles Nodrum Gallery, 2003, cat. 23 (illus.)

This work has a box frame. The canvas is laid onto a boacking board. There is scutting along all debate edges. This work needs UV. A small scutt in yellow diagonal strupple, minor and on surface. A pencil line running the opposite what to diagonal is apparent, but this is most likely by the artist.
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Along with Dick Watkins, Tony McGillick, Royston Harpur and others, Gunter Christmann was one of the abstractionist Young Turks associated with Sydney's Central Street Gallery in the late 1960s. The present work dates from 1966, the year that Terry Smith has identified as constituting the first phase of the stylistic development of colour-form painting in Australia, that of tentative, eclectic experimentation.¹

Working under the influence of Michel Seuphor's book Abstract painting² and locally of David Aspden's colour experiments, the young Christmann produced a series of square canvases in bright, flat geometric divisions, paintings that were both reductive in the manner of Constructivism and dynamic in the manner of de Stijl, while their 'razzle-dazzle strips of  ... purple, yellow, pink and blue'³  also reflected then-current Op Art fashion. When these paintings (among them the present work) were shown at Central street in October, the Sunday Telegraph critic described them as 'crisp optics of the unromantic persuasion ... with colours subtle and splendid ... the late sixties exemplified.'⁴

1. Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian art (vol. II): the twentieth century – modernism and Aboriginality, Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002, pp. 101-102
2. Michel Seuphor, Abstract painting, London: Prentice-Hall, 1962
3. Elwyn Lynn, 'Gunter Christmann', Art and Australia, vol. 10 no. 3, January 1973, p. 244
4. Sunday Telegraph, 30 October 1966