“Gershon Iskowitz”, Gallery Moos, April 5th - May 8th, 1979
Literature
Peter Mellen, “Landmarks of Canadian Art”, Toronto, 1978, page 240
Dennis Reid, “A Concise History of Canadian Painting” (third edition), Toronto, 2012, page 375
Adele Freedman, “Gershon Iskowitz: Painter of Light”, Toronto/ Vancouver, 1982, pages 132 and 148
Iskowitz drew on his personal recollections of experiences with landscape for his work, describing how he would take “...the experience, out in the field, of looking up in the trees or in the sky, of looking down from the height of a helicopter. So what you try to do is make a composition of all those things, make some kind of reality...That's painting.” The northern Canadian landscape provided him with striking patterns which emerged through tiers of scattered clouds below.
After his flight to Yellowknife in 1977, Iskowitz “felt confident enough to begin using deep purple and green matrixes.” By 1979, his palette evolved further and his shapes became elongated. “Violet - A” is composed of brilliant forms in contrasting blue, violet, green and yellow tones, which develop upon an energetically painted surface. Dennis Reid describes the artist's process: “Iskowitz worked only at night under artificial light, in oils... He would build up a picture slowly, applying a colour, then when it had dried, applying another over it, leaving only parts of the previous layers exposed, thinly veiling others, or obscuring some parts entirely.”
In 1982, Freedman writes how over the past decade of his artistic production, Iskowitz's accents “have become more marked and their tone more confident and direct. They are about his excitement of discovering a new blue...a fresh nuance or shape.” His dealer, Walter Moos, expressed that, during the 1970s, Iskowitz was “propelled into a fresh gust of activity”, demonstrating that his much-celebrated inclusion in the 1972 Venice Biennale “had by no means quenched his thirst for self-discovery.”
“Violet - A” underscores the artist's remarkable handling of colour harmonies, textures and patterns. This painting was selected as the cover image of the exhibition invitation for the artist's spring 1979 show at Gallery Moos, Calgary. A copy of the invitation accompanies this lot.
