signed and dated 1985 lower right; signed and titled on the reverse and signed on the stretcher; unframed
30 × 40 in (76.2 × 101.6 cm)
Auction Estimate:$5,000 - $7,000
Sale date:May 28, 2019
Price Realized
$8,850
(including Buyer's Premium)
Provenance
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature
Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik, Rita Letendre: Fire & Light, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, June 29 - September 17, 2017, pages 17-20
If Letendre’s large canvases of the 1970s reflected her fascination with depicting movement and vibration by combining hard-edged technique with airbrush, her works of the 1980s demonstrated a return to a more lyrical expression of the essential elemental forces that animate life. Light, a guiding force within the artist’s practice, appears in this 1985 canvas as a brilliant yellow band of pigment searing through the lower half of the composition. As though bisecting ground and firmament, the bright bar of colour dissolves into a rich cobalt haze in a gestural effect that evokes the work’s titular sunrise.
