Lot 31: TONY CLARK (B. 1954)

Sacro-Idyllic Landscape
signed, dated and titled 'Tony Clark/'Sacro-Idyllic Landscape'/1985' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
45.5 x 71 cm

The artist
Private collection, Melbourne

"Tony Clark works across the histories of art and architecture, design and decoration. In so doing he confounds the categories of high and low as he works within and across conventional aesthetic hierarchies in which architecture presides over sculpture, then painting, and then the more lowly decorative and graphics arts...

Clark's treatment of architectural, landscape and decorative genres is further complicated by a diverting and deliberate 'amateurism'. As an amateur, one who loves to paint, he is cheerfully indifferent to the professionalism of the result. The concept of failure - the practice of botched imitations and 'getting it wrong' - is built into the work, as much for the organic and uncanny possibilities it affords, but also to offset the lofty and transcendental values characteristic of 'peinture a la grande maniere'"(M Delany, Tony Clark - Public and Private Paintings 1982-1998, Melbourne, 1998, p.7)

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Please note this work should not be represented by a diamond in the catalogue