Bedroom interior

When London-born and trained Edward Le Bas first travelled to Majorca, France and Morocco, he developed a modernist style of painting with broad planes of unmodulated bright colours and textured surfaces.

Like many of his British modernist peers (and Australian counterparts) he applied this style to the fleeting moment of an everyday situation in this domestic interior. With this work’s cropped composition, compressed space and tilted picture plane, Le Bas daringly introduces an empty space into the composition, making it central to its overall balance. The vivid blue floor occupies almost the entire foreground. Playing on the contrast of empty flatness and intense colour in the furniture and interior’s details, Le Bas imbues this unassuming subject with a sense of inner vitality.