Sydney Ball

Catalogue number: 6

acrylic on canvas

118.50 x 137.50

Provenance: Estate of Sydney Ball

Exhibited: Sydney Ball: Recent Paintings - Structures Series, Charles Nodrum Gallery, 16 April - 9 May 2009, no. 5; Reductive, ACGA Gallery, Federation Square, Melbourne, 3 - 29 November, 2009

Literature & references: Wendy Walker, Sydney Ball: Prophet of abstraction: 'The emergence at the end of the 1990s of an insistent form in Ball's paintings - reminiscent of shapes in early drawings of rock formations from his landscape works - gave rise to the asymmetrical, ragged-edge motifs in the abstract paintings of Structures ... the subtitle of 'Structures 2 - Abstract Architecture' is an indication that Ball's point of reference for the series of work is architectural form in space; specifically, both the contemporary architecture of Zaha Hadid and the reductive modernist constructions of Miles van der Rohe. From the outset, Ball has maintained that the circle motif - critical to he graphic potency of the highly-resolved 'Cantos' - represented the Chinese symbol for infinity. In the vibrant paintings of the 2007 'Structures 2' series Ball reinstates the disc within a square as a strategy (as it was in the 1960s) for the introduction of additional colour...'