Dancers
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About the work
- Location
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Country: Other
City: other locations abroad
This painting illustrates the experimental approach to material and technique that typifies Stephen Buckley’s artistic practice. Instead of painting directly onto a flat canvas, he has interweaved strips of canvas together and painted them in four blocks of colour. A lively group of organic forms, resembling birds, airplanes or leaves, are randomly arranged over three-quarters of the grid-like background. Their defined white outlines give them a three-dimensional effect so that they appear to float over the canvas. Buckley often creates surfaces by weaving materials into grid-like constructions, and he once described the grid as ‘...a basic universal that fixes things.’
Buckley often makes indirect references to works of art by earlier modern artists. Dancers alludes to Henri Matisse’s renowned painting La Danse (1909) in its subject matter and vivid use of colour; but also to a work by Francis Picabia, Conversation (1922), that Buckley was familiar with. As a student at the University of Leicester in 1964, Buckley helped to install a major exhibition of Picabia and he was able to handle and observe the works in detail.
From the late 1960s, Buckley experimented with unconventional materials as diverse as household paint, shoe polish, carpet and old clothes, in addition to the more traditional oil on canvas. He also used unusual techniques such as tearing, stapling and burning in his work. By revealing the physical make-up he set out to highlight the intrinsically beautiful, yet imperfect properties of ordinary materials.
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Details
- Artist
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Stephen Buckley (1944 - )
- Title
- Dancers
- Date
- 1975
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- height: 152.50 cm, width: 254.00 cm, depth: 9.00 cm
- Acquisition
- Purchased from Christie's, 25 May 1994
- Inscription
- verso tl: DANCERS / Stephen Buckley / 1975
- Provenance
- London, Kasmin; London, Christie's, 25/05/1994 (Lot 125)
- GAC number
- 16843