Lot 53

Niagara at Hill Smith Gallery, Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide 19 March-2 April 1999, cat. no. 5

Considered and enigmatic are two adjectives often used to describe the art of Rick Amor. In the early stages of his career, when many of his peers were pursuing abstraction and conceptualism, Amor was, perhaps unfashionably, firmly embedded in figuration. Over four decades his single-minded and clear vision has not wavered, cementing his position as a major contemporary artist and as master of the evocative and the unsaid.
'The Night' features a solitary man, standing within a building foyer, or perhaps guarding a museum. It is an eloquent expression of Amor's continual interest in the intersections between urban environments, the human subject, dream spaces and memory while imparting a strong sense of elusiveness.
Linda Short, the curator of Rick Amor's 2008 retrospective at Heide Museum of Modern Art wrote on another important aspect of his work; "Amor has commented that he is always trying to 'distance the viewer', to persuade them to 'look into the painting'. In this respect, his lone figures can be read as a kind of substitute viewer of the landscape depicted, locating '…an alternative point of view which allows us to experience a heightened state of solitude'. For Amor does not tell stories, he provides moments in them."(1)

(1) Short. L , 'A Single Statement of a Single Mind' in Rick Amor; A Single Mind, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2008, (exhib.cat), p.75