Description
signed and dated (to reverse), oil on canvas
Dimensions
171.2cm x 162.6cm (67.4in x 64in)
Footnote
Note:
Ray Parker was closely associated with the Abstract Expressionist school of art, Colour Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. He was an influential teacher, holding posts at the University of Minnesota and was instrumental in Post-Painterly Abstraction, a movement coined by the critic Clement Greenberg.
This significant oil painting comes from an important period of Parker's oeuvre when he turned to "simple painting". Here we find that form and content have been stripped away and cleared to free the colour to be on its own, cloud-like forms of intense colour set against an off-white background.
Parker wrote 'The simple paintings…were made then with the thought that cutting out everything else but pigment on ground would let color tell the whole story. I found images that floated, rested heavily, hung, nudged, bumped, touched, hovered in vast voids of separation, were many, were few, isolated, single, alone. Today these paintings are still quiescent, bound by the gravity that makes bodies in orbit hang in a stillness where the slowest movement marks the space from one to another."
His work of this period would lay the ground work for Colour Field and minimalist paintings of the 1960s in America, and was influential on a whole array of artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Helen Frankenthaler and Friedel Dzudas.