Lot 107: ROBERT MACPHERSON (B. 1937)

Black - White (Vindex) for E
signed, dated and titled on each panel:
I. '4 PANELS/I/R.MACPHERSON/BRISBANE 75/MAY/BLACK - WHITE (VINDEX) FOR E' (on the reverse of the black panel)
II. 'BLACK - WHITE (VINDEX) FOR E MAY 75 4 PANELS (II) R.MACPHERSON/BRISBANE' (on the reverse of the grey panel)
III. 'R.MACPHERSON/BRISBANE/MAY 75 III BLACK - WHITE (VINDEX) FOR E' (on the reverse of the black panel)
IV. '4 PANELS (IV) BLACK - WHITE (VINDEX) FOR E MAY '75 R.MACPHERSON BRISBANE' (on the reverse of the grey panel)
acrylic on canvas
173.4 x 206.3 cm (each panel)

The artist
David Rankin, 1975-2001
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2001

Related Works: All exhibited at The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1975: Stroke over Black - Stroke over White (for Nikos), July/August 1974 (4 panels); White-Black (Arago) to S.S, March/April 1975 (4 panels) (collection of Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney); Black-White (Kilrain) for O.M, April 1975 (4 panels) (collection of National Gallery of Australia, Canberra); Two Blacks (Nordon) for M.M, July 1975 (collection of Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth).

Robert MacPherson is one of the most pre-eminent artists of his generation, having developed and sustained a highly personal vocabulary of investigative methodologies that index various processes behind the physical act, or idea, of making a painting. His early work rigorously stressed equivalence between idea and object, and has resulted in a body of work, or MacPherson vernacular, that crosses and confronts key elements of Modernism with a homely brand of formalism. He is one of only a handful of Australian artists that now occupies a rare domain in the global legacies of minimal and conceptual art from the 1960s and beyond.

With an emphasis on a supposedly reductive, yet elegant economy of means, the simplicity of which belies a careful conceptual structure and aesthetic system, an important image such as Black-White (Vindex) For E. contains the legible incidents that describe the method and trace of its making, and gestural limitations of the artist's body. In Trevor Smith's summation, the finite stretch of MacPherson's body has a fruitful relationship with Frank Stella's practice, and paradoxically delimits an effectively unlimited range of containers that an artist might nominate to execute process variations seen throughout the Black-White works. (T Smith, "The World in My Paintbrush" in Robert MacPherson exh. cat., Perth, 2001, p. 61)

In a rare interview recorded for the Institute of Modern Art in 1975, MacPherson elaborated further his ambition for the Black-White works:

"...and the reason I restrict myself to black and white is I just see it as a tool, like a brush or whatever, or the paint that I am using, so that there is just not this seductiveness of colour to get between the viewer and the viewed. There's not this additional thing, to get between the work and the process. With black it's a great challenge to show process definition in the work. It's a very very hard problem to resolve. I think that either black or white for me defines process, and that's what I'm on about." (D Green in Robert MacPherson, exh. cat., Brisbane, 1975)

Various commentaries from the time elucidate different formulae imposed across various panels within each unit, and provide a guide to certain principles employed by MacPherson to govern outcomes. As Ian Still suggested, the main principle was that a finely tuned, expressive unity within the unit develop out of how the image was planned - black or white, singly or combined, rolled or brushed, matt or gloss, thin or heavy. (I Still "Robert MacPherson", Art & Australia, vol 15, no.4, Winter 1978)

Others read his methods of painterly application across active and inactive surfaces as having formed a subtext rich in different interrelationships, where the kinetic movement of wet and washed pigments into each other was likened to drifts of fog over lofty peaks. Although the artist claimed no more than an austere covering in the most natural way, without forcing the medium, Langer further argued our prolonged contemplation of them invoked the rhythm and flow of meditative states to mesmerising effect. (Dr G Langer "It's there in Black and White", The Courier-Mail, August 26 1975)

Key components of Black-White (Vindex) For E. are the grey areas that arose from the mix of the two neutrals - black and white. It is known that MacPherson took interest in a Scientific American article by physicist Alan L. Gilchrist titled 'The Perception of Surface Blacks and Whites' and the theory of grey as a key determinant of research into perceived distributions of light and shadow. More likely, however, is that the artist developed ideas from the series central to his own examination of spatial relations between the surface and its neighbours, and saw Gilchrist's findings as supportive of his painterly hypotheses. As such, the Black-White works also act as the catalytic precursor to increasingly complex investigations seen in multiple unit series such as Scale from the Tool, the Merles group of paintings, and others where the process of the facture is made transparent.

We are grateful to Simon Wright, Director of Griffith Artworks and Dell Gallery Queensland College of Art for this catalogue entry

A 10% Goods and Services tax (G.S.T) will be charged on the Buyer's Premium on all lots in this sale.

The panels of this work have been reproduced incorrectly as horizontal in the catalogue