Abstraction in Blue, c. 1960. Oil on board. 50 × 60 cm.
Lot 017 · Paintings
Abstraction in Blue
Toss Woollaston (attributed)
Year
c. 1960
Medium
Oil on board
Dimensions
50 × 60 cm
Estimate
NZD 16,000–22,000
A work of considerable formal authority, the composition built from a series of interlocking planes of blue — from deep ultramarine to a pale, almost grey cerulean — with passages of raw umber and white that create a sense of spatial recession without recourse to conventional perspective. The paint is applied with the directness and economy that characterise Woollaston's best work: no passage is overworked, and the board support is allowed to show through in several areas, contributing to the overall luminosity of the surface.
Artist
Toss Woollaston (attributed)
Mountford Tosswill Woollaston (1910–1998), known as Toss, was one of the founding figures of modernism in New Zealand painting. Working in isolation in Nelson and the West Coast, he developed a painterly language of great originality that drew on Cézanne, the German Expressionists and the New Zealand landscape simultaneously. His work was largely unrecognised during the 1940s and 1950s but was championed by the critic and poet Charles Brasch and is now held in every major New Zealand public collection. The attribution of the present work is supported by comparison with signed examples and by a label on the reverse.