Lot 33

In very good condition overall. No apparent faults to report. Framed in an elegant light wood shadow box frame, overall size 88 x 123.5cm.


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Leonard Joel makes no guarantee of the originality of mechanical or applied components. Absence of reference to such modifications does not imply that a lot is free from modifications.

Watters Gallery, Sydney (label verso)
Private collection, Sydney
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 14 May 2013, lot 14
Private collection, Melbourne

Ken Whisson: An Exhibition of Paintings, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 18 October - 4 November 1995, cat. no. 8 (illus.)

Blue Chip XVI: The Collector's Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 4-29 March 2014, cat. no. 26

Sydney based artist, Ken Whisson, has been widely recognised as one of the most dedicated painters of Australian suburbia. With a career spanning across sixty years, Whisson's work has been exhibited broadly including at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

Outer Suburb of Melbourne Under Rain 1994 demonstrates Whisson's increasingly linear and graphic abstraction on the Australian landscape. Over time, Whisson has developed his own method, entwining his subjects together through bold outline, repetition and muted colour creating a sense of ubiquity and unity between ground, sky and medium. Visually, this work is fixed on a section of land where urbanisation meets industrialisation. The artist hints at family homes through the triangular shapes of coloured roofs and greenery, combined with dark and imposing structures and dividing roads. These homes are at the periphery of the industrial environment and the fringe of suburbia.

By focusing on the industrial landscape, Whisson encourages the viewer to see what is often unseen. These fastly-changing urban areas can often become lost to the plight of industrialisation, invisible to the surrounding world, yet somehow vital to the increasing demands of the economy. His works are not just paintings but constructions, with human life overcome by the intersecting and overlapping shapes of the material world.

Lucy Foster
Art Specialist