signed and dated 1978 lower left; titled on a gallery label on the reverse
48.5 × 61.5 in (123.2 × 156.2 cm)
Auction Estimate:$15,000 - $20,000
Sale date:May 22 - June 2, 2020
Price Realized
$16,200
(including Buyer's Premium)
Provenance
Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, Calgary
Literature
Bau-Xi Gallery, “Jack Shadbolt: Recent Paintings”, Exhibition held concurrently at the Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver and Toronto, 1988, page 52
“Sea Edge 5” is exemplary of Jack Shadbolt's work of the late seventies, which has been considered “some of the most ambitious of his entire career, not just in their scale but in their attempt to sustain a creative momentum through a period of time.” In 1975, the artist travelled to Iran, Afghanistan and India, which inspired him to work in large-scale colourful works in serial form. Shadbolt's preference for working in sequences and series in the late 70s was “compared with pop aesthetics, but he associated repetition with myth, ritual and sexuality.” “Sea Edge 5” serves as part of a series on the theme of abstracted seascapes. Bau-Xi's exhibition catalogue on Shadbolt's work of the late 70s and early 80s remarks that, “in a philosophical sense, Shadbolt's paintings have always argued, over-strenuously at times, against emptiness. He has a horror of the void, which he equates with a numbing and incapacitating meaninglessness.” This statement holds true in the compact faceted forms in “Sea Edge 5” that fill the colourful canvas.
