Sold for: $28,125

PROVENANCE
Isaacs Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Ontario
Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, June 17, 2009, lot 39
Acquired from the above by an Important Private Collection, Montreal

LITERATURE
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2007, page 97

Painters Eleven was a thought-provoking and progressive artistic group whose first meeting was in 1953 in Toronto. Their focus drove Walter Yarwood to experiment with new elements in tightly organized abstract works such as Island. Barrie Hale, a critic of the period, saw this new painting form take shape and coined it “The Toronto Look.” He further stated that “the jeopardy of gesture, the path of the artist’s hand … over the surface of the painting, the orchestration of the artist’s entire means toward the final work itself—these stamp the Toronto artist of the time as clearly as the compulsion to shake the ‘respectability’ of the establishment painters that preceded them stamped their lives.”

Fellow Painters Eleven artist Oscar Cahén influenced Yarwood greatly throughout his career. Cahén had a European German Expressionist aesthetic derived from his training in Europe, which Yarwood adapted in his abstracts. The use of indistinct images, central blocks of isolated colour and broad gestural brush-strokes are all present in this dynamic composition.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars