Acquired directly from the Artist, Ottawa, 1978
Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery
Exhibited
"Lochhead '72: Recent Paintings by Kenneth Lochhead", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 7 January-15 February 1972
"Selected Contemporary Works from the Winnipeg Art Gallery Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 3-16 February 1976
"Kenneth Lochhead: An Exhibition of Paintings 1952-1975", Art Gallery of Windsor; travelling to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 16 December 1977- 12 February 1978
"The Development of Canadian Art", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 10 June 1978- 28 January 1979
"Contemporary Works from the Winnipeg Art Gallery Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 20 January-10 February 1979
"Contemporary Works from the Winnipeg Art Gallery Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 16 August-31 October 1982
"Contemporary Art from the Winnipeg Art Gallery Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 5-22 April 1984
"Canadian Historical Art from the Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 6 April-16 July 1989
"Untitled (Big Works from the Collection)", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 29 October-19 November 1996
"Kenneth Lochhead from the Collection", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 23 November 1999-16 March 2000
"New Music Festival", Winnipeg Art Gallery, 27-31 January 2012
"The Collection on View" (to accompany the 2013 Gallery Ball), Winnipeg Art Gallery, 11-20 October 2013
Literature
Roald Nasgaard, "Abstract Painting in Canada", Toronto/Vancouver, 2007, page 154
This artwork is currently on display at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Please contact our specialists for more information.
Along with fellow artist Arthur McKay, Kenneth Lochhead helped to initiate Saskatchewan’s Emma Lake Workshops in 1955. The artist program earned notoriety for bringing Canadian artists into direct collaborative contact with major international modernists. American critic Clement Greenberg led the 1962 workshop, an event which would prove decisive for Lochhead. Greenberg advocated for flatness as a crucial quality in abstract painting and an avoidance of illusory pictoral depth. Lochhead’s interest in Greenberg’s ideas materialized in his painting as a move away from gestural to colour field abstraction.
In the early 1970s, Lochhead began to create paintings using a spray gun rather than paint brushes. Where his paintings of the 1960s had featured hard-edge shapes of free floating colour, Lochhead’s new work consisted of delicate curving wisps of atmospheric hues. This technique paralleled the poured and stained paint surfaces of artists Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, also championed by Clement Greenberg.
“Big Angel” features sensuous, curving forms in atmospheric, soft focus. The monumental scale makes a grand visual statement, enveloping the viewer in cloudy colour. Writer Michael Greenwood observed “The spray-gun paintings are no less composed than the previous geometric ones, but their structure has been pulled off with a masterly nonchalance that looks easy and uninhibited. Perhaps these paintings of unqualified Matissian and Miró-esque pleasure are, finally, Lochhead’s most individual contribution.”
