Lot 101

Purchased Watters Gallery, Sydney 1994
Private collection, Sydney

James Gleeson: Paintings from the Past Decade, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 9 September-3 October 1994 (label attached verso)
30th Anniversary Summer Exhibition, Watters Gallery, Sydney, November 1994
James Gleeson, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Maitland, 24 September-24 October 2004
James Gleeson: Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, Wagner Art Gallery, Sydney, 26 May-21 June 2007 (on loan)

Free, R., James Gleeson: Images from the Shadows, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996 revised edition, p. 129, pl. 46 (illus.)

In everyday speech, the word 'surreal' is conventionally used to describe the bizarre, the unusual and the strange. While these adjectives are often applicable to the paintings of James Gleeson, the literal meaning of surreal, consisting of 'sur', meaning above or beyond and 'real', the meaning of which is obvious, is often forgotten.
In the works of James Gleeson, we encounter objects and forms which are grounded in the real, but which appear in unexpected juxtapositions and arrangements.
As Gleeson himself notes in Renée Free's book, 'James Gleeson: Images from the Shadows', a publication in which this work is illustrated:
'As human beings we do not have the capacity to imagine the unimaginable. We can only project from a basis of the known. We can invent nothing that is entirely new. All that we can do is bring together pre-existing realities in such new relationships as might surprise us into feeling that we have caught a momentary glimpse of something that had previously been hidden from us.' (1)
Another concern of Gleeson and the Surrealists is to liberate the self from reason and the selective habits of mind which constrain the way we conceive of and experience the world. This constitutes an attempt to gain access to the subconscious, with all its deep recesses and dark shadows, and enter into a broader experience of reality.
Relatively few paintings by Gleeson depict the artist, although well known examples include 'The Arrival of Implacable Gifts' 1985, which is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and 'Portrait of the Artist as an Evolving Landscape' 1993, which sold for a record price at auction in 2007.
The current work, Landscape with 'Self-Portrait in Parenthesis' 1994, includes a parenthetical reference to the artist, whose face appears at the bottom of the painting, as if looking through a small, clean section in a misted pane of glass or a mirror.
This work, which provides an insight into the inner workings of the artist's own subconscious, exhibits a dynamic fluidity stemming from Gleeson's belief in the essential mutability of things. As the artist himself stated, 'Metamorphosis has always been…one of the basic facts of life.' (2)

(1) Free, R. James Gleeson: Images from the Shadows, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996, p. 42.
(2) ibid., p. 43.