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About
Artist, writer, curator, critic, adminstrator - Elwyn Lynn was unstinting in his lifelong dedication to art, both as practitioner and observer. As member, then president, of Sydney's Contemporary Art Society, he was a major contributor, and editor from 1955, to its newsletter, the CAS Broadsheet, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s wrote extensively on texture painting.
Lynn's early interest in surface, ground and texture, had the collages of Picasso, Kurt Schwitters' Merz pictures, and Klee as precursors, however the discovery of the works of the Spaniards Tàpies, Feito, Cuixart, Millares and Saura, provoked further research into the entire movement. He looked, in particular, at the work of Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, and the Italian Alberto Burri.
'Battle plan' exudes an immense physical presence with its allusions to cracked and eroded terrain, as Robert Hughes wrote in 1963:
"His hard pastes - smooth as ancient rocks, perforated with holes or creased and sagging like skin - inhabit an area of significant experience, which lies wholly beyond drama or declamation. It is an art of silences ... the essential quality of [his] pictures ... is their Sartrean "otherness": the silent wrinkled hides, the grey intrusive blocks of matter, even the glued-on fragments of lettering, go on existing whether we look at them or not. No effort of ours changes their contained identity".
Australian Art Department, AGNSW, 2001
Details
Date
(1966)
Materials used
sand, synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Dimensions
127.0 x 127.0 cm stretcher; 129.0 x 129.0 x 4.4 cm frame
Signature & date
Signed u.l. verso, ink "Elwyn Lynn". Signed u.r. verso, ink ".../ Elwyn Lynn/ ...". Not dated.
Credit
Purchased 1967
Location
Not on display
Accession number
OA27.1967
Shown in 6 exhibitions
Exhibition history
Elwyn Lynn exhibition: Festival of Perth 1967, Skinner Galleries, Perth, Perth, 31 Jan 1967–08 Feb 1967
Elwyn Lynn (1967), Hungry Horse Gallery, Paddington, May 1967–Unknown
Acquisitions 1967, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 06 Mar 1968–01 Apr 1968
Elwyn Lynn: two decades (1977), Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Paddington, 24 Oct 1977–18 Nov 1977
Three decades of Australian landscape painting from 1945: from the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1982), National Gallery of Papua New Guinea, 24 Mar 1982–05 May 1982
Art in view (1983), Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest, Emu Plains, Apr 1983–Jul 1983
Referenced in 7 publications
Bibliography
Barry Pearce, Australian art: in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 'Landscape and gesture', pg. 239-240, Sydney, 2000, 245 (colour illus.), 301.
Peter Pinson, Elwyn Lynn retrospective 1956-1990, Sydney, 1991, 10-12, 62. plate no. 9; cat.no. 9
Peter Pinson, Elwyn Lynn: metaphor + texture, St Leonards, 2002, 56, 57 (colour illus.), 104, 160, 166. plate no. 11
Peter Pinson, Elwyn Lynn Elwyn Lynn: two decades, Sydney, 1977, (illus.).
1967 Acquisitions, Sydney, 1967, 14. cat.no. 12
Art in perspective, Marrickville, 1993, 132 (colour illus.).
Elwyn Lynn, Adelaide, 1969, (illus.). not paginated; no plate numbers