Paul Guiragossian

 

 Paul Guiragossian (1926 –1993) was an Armenian Lebanese painter.
"Art is greater than me, greater than any artist. I will remain an apprentice until the end. Art is our oxygen, it keeps us conscious, and without it we are insignificant. It's the crossroad of all disciplines, of all sciences. Like a sun it illuminates the past, the present and the future. It preserves our humanity, it is so much more important that man is hardly a rough draft. Our problem is that we don't live up to our humanity'. (Paul Guiragossian). A trajectory of Paul Guiragossian's oeuvre conveys an evolution of an abstract practice that originated in figurative portraiture. He is of Armenian origin, born in Jerusalem and lived in Lebanon. Undoubtedly his background has highly influenced a body of work that not only responds and is limited to the region's historical context but one that engages with the postmodern occupation with notions of identity, and 'the other'. In Madonna and Child (lot 13) dated circa early 1960s, Guiragossian draws from a palette of warm hues of red often associated with religious iconography. The main figure appears to be flat against the surface whilst tablets of religious narratives frame Mary. We begin to witness the emergence of thick brushstrokes- a style that defines Guiragossian's later works. Additionally, the context in which this work was executed is significant in gaining insight to Guiragossian's earlier practice. The Middle East was in upheaval, the Arabs were defeated in the 1956 war with Israel, and the Armenian community was vulnerable to constant persecution. Guiragossian was granted a scholarship and travelled to Florence and Paris to pursue his studies in painting. He was abandoned by his mother from an early age, thus possibly explaining the ubiquity of the female figure in his works. It may be suggested that this work reveals the artist's personal struggle and marks a shift from a more traditional style towards the later abstract work that is manifested in vibrant and luminous colours. Nevertheless, it certifies and reasserts Guiragossian's mastering of figurative technique and his proficiency as an artist. In lot 14 dated circa 1968-1972, Guiragossian employed thick brushstrokes in a muted brown palette to depict a laborer who appears to be kneeling on the ground with his head resting on his arms. The figure's posture suggests melancholy, fatigue and hardship. By observing and painting the everyday life, he sought to express the human condition in its most difficult and most wonderful state. He called himself "the artist of the people", always acknowledging himself as one of them, therefore accepting that this was also his own condition. Guiragossian creates a certain intimacy and understanding between himself and his character in lot 14. This painting further resonates traditional drawings of the labour workers executed by European painters in the 19th century. Guiragossian arrives at his later works of elongated abstract vertical slim figures in the late 1970s. Vertical figures are manifested through the use of thick brushstrokes. The artist often used multiple layers of paint to create a thick opaque texture on the surface offering multiple depths throughout. Additionally in this period, his palette expanded to vibrant and luminious colours intrinsic to a Mediterranean landscape of sea, mountain and sun. 'The colors of the sun and the rainbow', he said, 'belonged to us in the Orient, it's from here where the sun rises and it's from here where it all begins'. However, the 1970s had witnessed the cusp of a Lebanese Civil War, raging throughout the 1980s, yet the brightness of his colours were also a symbol of giving hope to his people in the Middle East during these decades of war. Guiragossian's abstract figures resonate with Jackson Pollock splurges of expressionist dismay or even recalls Barnet Newman's vertical zips conveyed in Adam and Eve. In Guiragossian's work there is nonetheless an undertone of positivity, a deliberate upward movement that is drenched in a vibrancy that is both static and in motion, possibly also evoking Alberto Giacometti's existentialist bronze sculptures that effect a perspective of distance. The elongated figures in Nocturne  stand with their heads slightly bowed, possibly suggesting a sense of mourning or resignation."(christies.com)

 

Gunter Damisch

 

 "Gunter Damisch (1958 - 2016 ) was an Austrian artist known for his lush paintings of rhizome-like forms and undulating lines. “My pictorial system is strongly guided by the idea of transformation and metamorphosis. These ambiguities fascinate me,” he once explained. Born on May 20, 1958 in Steyr, Austria, he went on to study under Arnulf Rainer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, during which time he was a member of the punk band Molto Brutto. After finishing school, Damisch began exhibiting his work and established himself in the Viennese contingent of the Neue Wilde movement, alongside Otto Zitko and Hubert Scheibl. In the decades that followed, the artist was the subject of exhibitions both in Austria and abroad. Damisch died on April 30, 2016 in Vienna, Austria. Today, his works are held in the collections of a number of Austrian museums, including the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, and the Museum Liaunig in Neuhaus."(artnet)
"Gunter Damisch works as a painter, draftsman and graphic designer but in recent years he has turned his attention increasingly to sculpture, developing a highly personal and complex cosmological view of the world. This world is inhabited by a large number of invented beings that can be ascribed to either a microcosmic biological or a macrocosmic spiritual world.
These beings drift in the streams of air, water, earth and fire emerging from a universe that has been subjected to a never-ending process of change by the creator. Gunter Damisch’s “Flämmler”, lucid amblers between time and space, can be seen in this context as metaphors for the fleetingness of human existence, at least for its consummation in a processual dimension."(artsper.com)

 

 

Gilberto Aceves Navarro - Figurative Expressionism Painting

Gilberto Aceves Navarro ( 1931 – 2019) was a Mexican painter and sculptor and a professor at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas and Academy of San Carlos. There have been more than two hundred individual exhibits of his work, with his murals found in Mexico, Japan and the United States. He received numerous awards for his work including grants as a Creador Artístico of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes and Bellas Artes Medal from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes.
Aceves Navarro never retired, even into his eighties, because he loved to paint. He liked to see how colors and forms take shape.He considered art not a simple pleasant vocation but rather a need and a kind of mental exercise.He created murals, oils, drawings, monumental sculpture, theater and poetry.He said that drawing was fundamental to his life, and preferred to work alone in his studio.Wikipedia

 

John Perceval - Australian Fine Art

"Perceval is recognised as one of Australia's most talented living artists. He holds the Office of the Order of Australia. His work is held by all major public galleries. He has won the John McCaughey, Vizard Wholohan and was joint winner of the Wynne with Dairy Farm in 1960.Perceval's art is very painterly. He likes to produce series and when he works appears to literally attack the canvas. He said, "Children are the real world. I have fought adulthood all my life"^ and this perhaps best sums up the wonderful imagination and the unwavering clarity in vision he presents in so much of his work: the knowledge of youth - the surety of being right.
An early influence on Perceval was Arnold Shore, who he met as a teenager and was interested in the heavily laden brush of unmixed colour used by Van Gogh. Other notable influences are Bosch, Brueghel, Tintoretto, El Greco, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Blake and as with many artists a lot of the work has reference to personal and childhood experience. Perceval covers most genres; his work includes landscapes, such as the Williamstown Series, religious and irreverent themes and some portraiture. His best periods are the forties and fifties when his paintings included The Nightmare and Mask Series, master-pieces like Negroes at Night, 1944, and Woman Pushing a Boy with Polio, 1943 where he uses repetitive brush strokes with each stroke laid side by side as seen in work by some of the Fauves. In the fifties, Perceval painted the Gaffney Creek Landscapes and the humorous Goat in a Cabbage Patch, 1956 where he uses many different textures of brushstroke as well as the drip application in quite illogical colours, which enhances surface quality.
Perceval is also a gifted ceramicist. The Angels are wonderful, small (22-48 cm) and exquisitely delicate, in contrast to the loose brush-stroke, spontaneous and often crude appliance seen in the paintings. Like Rembrandt, he brings these heavenly creatures down to earth and accompanies them with what Kenneth Clark has called the "life giving roughage of the grotesque".^^ Perceval said inspiration came from his kids, myth and life."(diggins.com.au)