NZ & International Fine Art Wednesday, 14 February 2024 - 6:00 PM start

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Douglas MacDiarmid (1922-2020) - Abstract Landscape with Figures

Realised: $2,600 plus premium

Lot Details

Douglas MacDiarmid (1922-2020) Abstract Landscape with Figures oil on board signed (centre right) 39.5 x 49.5cm PROVENANCE Fleischl Collection NOTES Supplied by Anna Cahill, Director, MacDiarmid Arts Trust A colourful assembly of European architectural forms, doorways, windows and two framed black and white figures…sculptures perhaps? Somewhat cubist in approach, it suggests a gallery or high vaulted Gothic church or abbey but gives no hint of the location. The painting most likely dates to the early 1950s, after Douglas settled in France. There is no ‘typical’ MacDiarmid painting, he painted simultaneously in diverse styles, topics and mediums. “I neither live nor work to formula, responding mostly to stimuli inner or outer, which have the effect of command. Mood evolves as the painting proceeds and decides the degree of abstraction or figuration, in general a blend of both, given the liberty and elusiveness of vision,” he said in 2013. He preferred to “evoke rather than state” and believed that what a viewer saw in a painting was its reality, rather than being told what to see. MacDiarmid loathed being pigeonholed by labels, which made him hard to classify. In 1962, when pressed to state what sort of painter he was for a show, he replied: “I regard myself as an expressionist painter, one who expresses the visual rhythm of things.”