GA023 - Australian and International Art

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8 14 FREDERICK WILLIAMS (1927-1982) (Desert Landscape) 1968 gouache on paper signed and dated lower right: Fred Williams 68 inscribed verso: 162 45 x 75 cm PROVENANCE The Australia Club Collection, Melbourne (cat no ACA 151) Deaccessioned and purchased from the above, circa 2006 Private collection, Melbourne $30,000–50,000 The National Gallery of Australia’s 2011 aptly titled exhibition, Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons, brought new and overdue emphasis to the artist’s extraordinary perspectives in gouache. The concept of ‘infinite horizons’ served a double interpretation. Firstly, there was the visual concept of the boundless that is imagined to lie beyond the land; a realm that dives into the never-ending space of the heavens. Secondly, looking at Williams’ oeuvre, we discover that the artist was able to conjure up what seems like an infinite inquiry into the nature of horizons: stretching, twisting and pulling them in every conceivable direction and angle, sometimes to the point of complete elimination. In 1967, Fred Williams and Clifton Pugh drove to Tibooburra in South Australia, about 300km north of Broken Hill. Williams found the area ‘washed out – but very alive.’ 1 Although many of Williams’ landscapes are ambiguous in location (titles aside), in Tibooburra, Williams was intent on capturing the essential nature of the flat Australian outback. In the present picture, Williams takes a leaf out of John Constable’s sketchbook of cloud studies. The sky is painted with a soft medley of greys and patches of pastel blues here and there, celebrating the atmospheric values of an overcast day. He reduces the red ochre landscape to a slender slip that recedes indefinitely into the horizon. With his signature dashes and dabs of the brush, he punctuates the red earth with desert flowers, scrub and all the greenery that he saw. A wind-beaten tree, that casts no shadow, is anchored defiantly against the elements in the centre of the image. While many might see the Australian outback as an empty and arid desert, Williams’ eye was drawn to the life it supported. The present painting, probably inspired by his trip in Tibooburra, is a celebration of how he saw life in the Australian desert. Other works from Fred Williams’ trip to Tibooburra are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (inter alia). We are grateful to Lyn Williams AM for her assistance in authenticating this work. Petrit Abazi 1 Fred Williams, cited in Deborah Hart, Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2011, p. 96
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GA023 - Australian and International Art

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