Reference: Carl Plate at Annette Larkin Gallery, Opening reception: Wednesday 11 October 6-8pm. The artists family will be at the opening. On view: 11 October-11 November 2017.
Annette Larkin Fine Art is proud to exhibit Carl Plate - Hard Colour: Paris Works 1970-1971. This will be the gallery’s first exhibition looking at the work of Carl Plate.
One of Sydney’s most influential artists of the post-war period, Carl Plate acquired an early appreciation of international contemporary art through his extensive travels. Inspired by the possibilities offered through abstract, non-representational language, collage was essential to both his creative process and his ideas for future paintings. Sourcing colour printed matter from magazines and papers that came to hand, he transformed his world into colour, shape, line and form. Using the idiom of abstraction to reflect an indeterminate order, Plate imbued his work with a sense of poetic ambiguity, and a glimpse into the unknown.
In the first years of the 1970s, we see Plate’s life-long practice of collage, in tandem with his paintings, displaying more definite colour with details pared back, and the work devoid of any figurative form. Marking a decisive shift from his earlier torn-edged and painterly abstractions, these works return to a pure form of collage, based solely on cutting and pasting with a new colourful sensibility.
In a review of an exhibition of these works held at Bonython Galleries, Sydney in November 1971, James Gleeson wrote: “After many years when he sought to get more and more effects from fewer and fewer colours he suddenly broadened his palette to encompass the rainbow. The result is a series of paintings that are more luxurious and sumptuous than anything he has previously done.” (J. Gleeson, The Sun, Sydney, 10 November 1971)
Publishing details: Annette Larkin Gallery, 2017. [inserted in Carl Plate - Collage 1938-1976]
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