Standing Nude, 1980

A$55,000 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Conte on paper, 73 x 52 cm, signed and dated lower right John Brack 1980 , framed. Widely considered to be one of Australia s great intellectual painters of the twentieth century, John Brack completed a number of critically acclaimed series of the female nude, which remained his touchstone with one of the great traditions of art, a testing ground to which he could constantly return Grishin, The art of John Brack , vol. 1, p. 156. Standing Nude, 1980 , is from a major series of female nudes executed in oil, conte and lithograph between 1979 1981, during a hiatus Brack took while working on his epic pencil Battle series. The works from this series of nudes are characterised by his models set against a stark, urban interior, and posed somewhat awkwardly, as if deliberately constructed to disconnect the subject against their environment. In 1981, Brack s large scale conte drawings would be reworked by the artist as lithographs for publication in the deluxe edition John Brack Nudes (Melbourne : Lyre Bird Press, 1981), drawn again on stone and printed for the book, where Standing Nude would serve as the opening image for the series. When considered as a series, the meaning of Brack s uneasy forms become apparent. In his introduction to the series in John Brack Nudes (1981), Gordon Thomson writes these are all about how it is, the human predicament There are always things of elating beauty, but they are always surrounded by restraints. The room is isolation. The space is ample, but

• Binding: Hardcover

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