THE REFLEXION (REMBRANDT), 2000
GARRY SHEAD
oil on plywood
89.0 x 121.0 cm
signed and dated lower right: Garry Shead / 2000
signed, dated and inscribed verso: The Reflexion (Rembrandt) 2000 / Garry Shead
Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide (label attached verso)
Private collection, Adelaide
Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 16 June 2004, lot 54
Private collection, Sydney
The following excerpt is taken from Sasha Grishin's book, Garry Shead and the Erotic Muse:
'The 'Artist and the Muse' series appears to grow almost seamlessly out of the 'Dance Sequence' of paintings. Unlike the earlier series of paintings, which were akin to military campaigns where there were periods of secretive preparation, studies and research before the first paintings appeared, these new series, which appeared in the late 1990s, burst on to the canvas with a sense of great confidence and security. In Shead's work, tongue-in-cheek humour cannot be equated with complete frivolity, so that by painting Rembrandt, Goya or Velázquez with their Muse, it is not an exercise in satire, but an exploration into a rather complex labyrinth of ideas. Shead is an artist who in most instances has to enter the work by putting himself into the composition " whether he be Lawrence, Prince Philip, a dancer or, in this case, an artist. However, by entering a composition, this does not imply that he 'owns' it, as painting grows through its own internal logic and momentum; he enters it to give it life and then participates in the delight and agony of its growth and development. On one level, these are strangely autobiographical paintings where, in a not too unkindly manner, we can note that we encounter the artist in period dress voyeuristically exploring the world of the Old Masters.'1
1. Grishin, S., Garry Shead and the Erotic Muse, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001, pp. 170-174