Untitled

Australian artist Robert Klippel became good friends with Riopelle when he went to Paris in 1948, and just before he left Paris in 1950 they swapped works. 'Untitled' 1949 and 'Untitled' 1950 [AGNSW collection] were given to Klippel in exchange for a sculpture and 6 drawings. Klippel remembers that the 1949 work was hanging in Riopelle's house at the time (and his wife, Françoise, raised some objection to it going) and the smaller work came from Riopelle's 1950 exhibition at Galerie Creuze, Paris.

Klippel gave the paintings to Marie Brown to look after when he went to America in 1957, and later suggested that they should one day be donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in memory of her husband, Clifford, who was a close friend of his.

These small paintings represent a major turning point in Riopelle's painting when he broke away from his earlier, more surrealist style and started to experiment with all over thick impasto paint. He is just beginning to push the paint, wet on wet, which is so characteristic of his later 1950s paintings such as 'Painting' 1957 also in the Gallery's collection.