-
Details
- Date
- 1965
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- synthetic polymer paint on canvas
- Dimensions
- 256.0 x 142.0 cm stretcher
- Signature & date
Signed and dated upper verso, black fibre-tipped pen "W.Turnbull ... 1965".
- Credit
- Gift of Edron Pty Ltd - 1995 through the auspices of Alistair McAlpine
- Location
- South Building, lower level 1, 20th-century galleries
- Accession number
- 262.2002
- Copyright
- © Estate of William Turnbull/DACS. Copyright Agency
- Artist information
-
William Turnbull
Works in the collection
- Share
-
About
In many of William Turnbull’s paintings of the 1960s, formal considerations such as line, colour and proportion merge with memories and experiences. The composition of '8-1965' has its genesis in a flight the artist took over the jungles of South-East Asia with his Singaporean wife, artist Kim Lim. Turnbull wrote that he saw below a ’view of thick uniform single colour texture of abundant and luxuriant growth, broken only by a river’s winding course’.
Turnbull served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and the views he saw from aeroplanes offered him a new way of perceiving the world. He later recounted that ’the main thing about flying for me was the fact that the world didn’t any longer look like a Dutch landscape; it looked like an abstract painting’.
-
Exhibition history
Shown in 2 exhibitions
William Turnbull: sculpture and painting, Tate Britain, England, 15 Aug 1973–07 Oct 1973
20th-Century galleries, lower level 1 (rehang), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 20 Aug 2022–2023
-
Bibliography
Referenced in 1 publication
-
Richard Morphet, William Turnbull: sculpture and painting, London, 1973, 59 (illus.), 69. cat.no.105
-