CANADIAN POST~WAR & CONTEMPORARY ART - Heffel

HEFFEL FINE ART AUCTION HOUSE 29
“…my paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by
a musician, films by a painter…”. With a sly sense of
humour, Snow makes art that probes perception,
consciously engaging the viewer in his questioning of
the act of viewing itself. When asked about how the
work Two fits within his œuvre, Snow connects this
early painting to other works from the early 1960s,
such as Theory of Love, in the collection of the Art
Gallery of Ontario. Pared down to binaries of positive/
negative, foreground/background and push/pull, the
piece becomes purely about surface ~ as the artist
states, it “…becomes an object, becomes sculpture.”
With Two, Snow used a stencil to create the rectangular
opening into the central dark red mass, a technique
that was to figure prominently in his further
explorations of the foreground/background binary in
his iconic Walking Woman series. The reds that
dominate the surface are broken by a tracery of subtle
craquelure, exposing a dark blue ground. As the
painting has aged, Snow’s intentional craquelure has
evolved, and in his view the result is either a success or
failure, based on the viewer’s perspective. However,
Snow’s humorous delivery of his comments on the
work made it clear that he considers it a success.
ESTIMATE: $15,000 ~ 20,000
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18 DENNIS EUGENE NORMAN
BURTON
1933 ~
Room~Mates #2
oil on canvas, signed and dated 1965
and on verso titled on the stretcher
36 x 24 in, 91.4 x 61 cm
PROVENANCE:
The Isaacs Gallery Ltd., Toronto
Private Collection, United Kingdom
LITERATURE:
Dennis T. Burton et al, Dennis Burton: Retrospective,
Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 1977, page 23
Dennis Burton’s work Room~Mates #2 marked a
particularly significant period in both the artist’s body
of work and the way in which art was being depicted in
the Toronto art scene at the time. In 1965, Burton
achieved renown for his Garterbeltmania paintings,
portraying women in garter belts. Room~Mates #2 was
inspired by the nudes of the Old Masters, but updated
by depicting women in modern underwear. The piece
is a culmination of characteristics for which the artist is
best known ~ draughtsmanship, colour sense and erotic subject matter. Burton himself often
felt that his subject matter was at times too personal, but also argued that, in fact, that was
what art was all about. As Burton wrote, “I hadn’t depicted anything particularly obscene or
pornographic; I had just depicted the female in underwear, which at that time I suppose was
a way to shock the middle class. But underwear was not just for its own sake; it was a matter
of getting an obsession and a ‘hang~up’ out of my system.”
ESTIMATE: $5,000 ~ 7,000
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