LOT DETAILS

Materials:

acrylic on canvas

Measurements:

72.05 in. (183.00 cm.) (height) by 120.00 in. (304.80 cm.) (width)

Markings:

signed and dated 'Storrier / 2000' lower right

Exhibited:

Tim Storrier, Still Life, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 21 September – 14 October 2000, (illus. invite) Tim Storrier, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 10 October – 4 November 2001A faintly disreputable aura has often hung around the still life because of the self-conscious design which is so often implied by such works and the facility with trompe l'oeil which marks the genre's best practitioners. It's a tradition associated with ultra-illusionistic and often decadent periods in art history. And, yet, as a host of painters, from the eighteenth-century French painter Chardin to the 1960's American pop artist Wayne Theibaud, have demonstrated, it's equally a genre with enormous symbolic potential. The still life, at its best, is a mode which renews our capacity to see apparently banal, everyday objects. The role of the still life in Storrier's oeuvre became explicit in the mid-1980s following a trip to Egypt to paint a series of commissioned images. In an exhibition titled Burning Of The Gifts, Storrier showed a work with the same title which depicted a pyre of melons, eels, snakes, pomegranates and watermelons smouldering ominously in an empty landscape. Discussing the image at the time it was exhibited, Storrier said the idea had come to him while visiting an Egyptian tomb. 'In the Tomb of Rameses, I saw an image of a table of fruit, ducks, lotus flowers, the head of a bull, set alight as an offering to Aten, spirit of the sun. I started painting my picture as a monumental still life, but along the way it gained many levels of meaning, and its ambiguity is part of its strength. It's hard to say if it's a barbecue or a rubbish heap. Is it burning or cooking?'1

Literature:

Catharine Lumby, Tim Storrier: The Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, pl. 152, p. 198-199 (illus. and dustjacket) Michael Reid, 'Outsider returns, bigger than ever', The Weekend Australian, 14-15 October 2000, p.31 (illus. detail) Jeff Makin, 'No challenge so deep', The Herald Sun, Melbourne, 15 October 2001, p. 82 (illus.) Ashley Crawford, 'Storrier fires up landscape of imagination', The Age, Melbourne, 25 October 2001, p. 6

Provenance:

Private collection, New South Wales