Title

Arthur Wicks: Colour Field.

Venues

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery [3] (22 December 2012 – 3 February 2013)

Date

(2012 – 2013)

Summary

Single-artist exhibition. Located: Australia (NSW). Prints, Paintings

Country of context

Australia

Abstract

A blaze of colour greets visitors to Wagga Wagga Art Gallery this summer, where one of the city‟s most acclaimed artists, Arthur Wicks, presents Colour Field, featuring revived and reworked paintings from the 1960s and 1970s. The prints and massive canvasses on display represent a period of Arthur‟s work that is still as shocking – and exciting – to the senses now as it was four decades ago.

The vivid and exhilarating works on show in Arthur Wicks: Colour Field include a mix of prints, paintings and sculptural pieces produced between 1966 and 1974, a period when artistic practice worldwide embraced ideas of "post-painterly abstraction‟ and geometric forms.

This radical mix of hard-edged shapes, flat planes of colour, and abstract amorphous fields still represents an abrupt shift in Australian art – a revolution in approaches to creative practice and theory that mirrored political and social revolutions throughout the country and the globe.

Arthur Wicks‟ re-engagement with the works on display in Colour Field has included extensive restoration, as many of the paintings, after forty years, required much care to be returned to their original, pristine appearance. Other pieces, inspired by this process, are reworkings, new explorations of aesthetic concepts, or translations from one artform to another.

'Arthur Wicks: Colour Field' will be officially opened at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery‟s final exhibition launch for 2012, on Friday 21 December, by Dr David Hansen, senior researcher and paintings specialist at Sotheby‟s Australia. Dr Hansen describes Arthur Wicks‟ work from this period as “deploying the formal language of hard-edge abstraction combined with various types of mechanical reproduction including photography, to develop an individual visual language responding to the aesthetics and politics of the time.” Colour Field is open to the public throughout the summer, from Saturday 22 December, 2012, until unday 3 February, 2013. [Wagga Wagga Art Gallery media release 20 December 2012].

Last Updated

10 Apr 2024