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Details
- Other Title
- Night Life
- Date
- 1984
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- PVA on canvas
- Dimensions
- 167.7 x 122.3 cm stretcher
- Signature & date
Signed and dated upper c. verso on canvas, black fibre-tipped pen "R.WATKINS/ 1984".
- Credit
- Gift of Danny and Lisa Goldberg 2013. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 8.2013
- Copyright
- © Dick Watkins/Copyright Agency
- Artist information
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Dick Watkins
Works in the collection
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About
Dick Watkins' 'Night time' dates from one of the most the energetic and innovative periods in the artist's practice, the early 1980s. Watkins was experimenting with a number of potentially conflicting 'styles', from an aggressively gestural abstraction to landscape and figure subjects. The bold experimentation in his painting at this time and the exhibitions he held in 1983, which ranged across these various subjects and styles, lead to an interest in Watkin's work by a younger generation of artists as well as his selection to represent Australia at the 1985 Bienal de Sao Paulo.
Watkin's seeming eclecticism confused some critics while others saw him as perhaps an accidental post-modernist, described by one artist/writer as an exemplary 'bricoleur', evoking rather than appropriating work by other artists. (Tillers, Sao Paulo Bienal catalogue, 1985).
This particular painting, like another in the Gallery's collection 'Birdland' 1981 continues in a trajectory in Watkins' painting from the 1970s which recalls the early totemic semi-abstractions of Jackson Pollock. The energetic gestures of the paint have a source, as with Pollock's paintings from the 1940s, in the artists' subconscious and the abstraction is not quite complete as some areas seem to coalesce into forms. Elements also recall paintings by Pablo Picasso, Ian Fairweather and Tony Tuckson. Watkins' ability to call on familiar painterly languages while creating distinctive, energetic and highly original works is one of the strengths of his practice.
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Exhibition history
Shown in 2 exhibitions
Dick Watkins (1983-84), Pinacotheca Gallery, Australia, late 1983–early 1984
Kandinsky-related collection display, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 Oct 2023–04 Feb 2024
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Bibliography
Referenced in 1 publication
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Natalie Wilson and Anneke Jaspers, Foundation Newsletter #22, 'Curators' and coordinators' reports: Australian art', pg. 6-7, Sydney, Jun 2013, 6.
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