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| Image | Sale date | Auction house | Location | Sale name | Lot No. | Estimate | Price Sold | Condition | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Aug 29, 2023 | Bonhams | Sydney | Important Australian Art | 4 | $****** - ****** | White Ram and Sleeping Figure, c. |
paintings
62 x 75 cm (24.41 x 29.53 in)
oil on canvas
signed lower right: "Arthur Boyd"
Clune Galleries, Sydney
The Collection of Dr Edward Jackson AM and Mrs Cynthia Jackson AM, Sydney
The Estate of the late Cynthia Jackson AM, Sydney
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 othercompositions, 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. Whereas 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
Infused with drama and painted with vigorous swirls of luscious paint, White Ram and Sleeping Figure , combines three of Boyd"s classic multifaceted components. The ram, a primordial beast that symbolizes lust and corruption; the swooping black crow, which in different times and cultures is associated with both re-birth, freedom and death; and the innocent sleeping figure - all set within the confines of dense native bushland.
"The iconography of Boyd"s compositions derive from and refers to memories and reflects the artist"s emotions...in Boyd"s work animals are not only symbols but actors like the human characters in his narrative. Both animals and people act out some real twist in the human condition. By reaching far back, the work suggests a timeless continuum; primeval, mythological and biblical times are settings for the actors in Boyd"s compositions. These are changing scenarios for the artists subjective iconography, the language of his visionary reality of apprehensions and desires. Each composition projects a situation perceived through the artist"s sentiment which has at its centre a code of social morality."2
Alex Clark
1. Grazia Gunn, Arthur Boyd: Seven Persistent Images , Australian
National Gallery, Canberra, 1985, pp. 14-15
2. Ibid., p. 15
Arthur Boyd (1920-1999)
White Ram and Sleeping Figure, c.1968
signed lower right: "Arthur Boyd"
oil on canvas
62.0 x 75.0cm (24 7/16 x 29 1/2in).
