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| Image | Sale date | Auction house | Location | Sale name | Lot No. | Estimate | Price Sold | Condition | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Aug 23, 2022 | Bonhams | Sydney | Important Australian Art | 59 | $****** - ****** | Sleeping Figure, Ram and Serpent |
paintings
76 x 101 cm (29.92 x 39.76 in)
oil on board
signed lower right: "arthur Boyd"
Blue Boyd Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne
Arthur Boyd"s work is imbued with a complex iconographic language that he developed throughout his career. Curator, Grazia Gunn discusses its importance in Arthur Boyd - Seven Persistent Images: "Boyd"s narrative began in the 1940s when he formulated his visual language in terms of basic emotional responses to people and things. His compositions are a continual reintegration of himself in terms of his past experiences projected through a consistent iconography. He is less interested in his particular response to the present, than he is in the overall coherent of his output and it is always legitimate to look for traces of past iconography when viewing his work..
To bring his compositions together Boyd uses two methods which often overlap and are at times used simultaneously. For the majority of his work up to the 1960s the compositions are structured by using the principles of assemblage, that is by juxtaposing identifiable events from other compositions, fragments and details from drawings, characters, objects and animals so as to create new relationships. The same elements always reappear in new compositions.
The later work, from about the early 1960s, is rhetorical in nature. Where as in earlier work the elements were iconographic fragments restructured into new compositions, the later work relies on transformation, amplification, exaggeration and transference of the images which make up Boyd"s iconography."1
The present work, painted with luscious swirls of paint, combines three of Boyds classic components - the serpent, which has the strength that history and tradition have instilled, the ram, a primordial beast that symbolizes lust and corruption, both of which lurk above the sleeping figure or entwined lovers.
"In many of the paintings of this period Boyd"s own visual narratives become extensions of classical myths and Christian
I"d like to feel that through my work there is a possibility of making a contribution to a social progression or enlightenment. It would be nice if the creative effort or impulse was connected with a conscious contribution to society, a sort of duty or service. I think you have to be able to make something which does involve concepts and ideas.
Boyd achieves this and goes beyond it. The themes in his paintings are charged with moral implications. Having established his own set of archetypal images, the artist moves from one to the other, creating new pictorial compositions and testing the range of his imagination and the borders of artistic freedom and finds no end."2
Alex Clark
1. Grazia Gunn, Arthur Boyd: Seven Persistent Images , Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1985, pp. 14-15
2. Ibid., p. 73
Arthur Boyd (1920-1999)
Sleeping Figure, Ram and Serpent, c.1967
signed lower right: "arthur Boyd"
oil on board
76.0 x 101.0cm (29 15/16 x 39 3/4in).
