James Gleeson

(1915-2008)

Phlebas The Phoenician, 1951

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Mr Ross Stay, Queensland, acquired directly from the artist c.1952
Private collection, Queensland

EXHIBITED
James Gleeson, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 3-15 September 1952, cat. 10
James Gleeson: Beyond the Screen of Sight, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 29 October 2004 - 27 February 2005; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 18 March - 13 June 2005, cat. 33 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE
Renée Free, James Gleeson: Images from the Shadows, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996, pl. 22b, p.91 (illus.), 182
Lou Klepac, James Gleeson: Beyond the Screen of Sight, The Beagle Press, Sydney in association with the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004, cat. 33, p. 113 (illus.)


In James Gleeson: Images from the Shadows, Gleeson discusses the present work in an interview with Renee Free: 'One of the most important and constantly recurring motifs through-out my work is based on sense of mutability of all forms and substances. Metamorphosis has always been, for me, one of the basic facts of life. Everything takes on a form, changes, falls apart and reforms in new organisations as part of an endless cycle.

When I painted Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician sailor cast up on the shore after his drowning, he has suffered a sea-change. He has become coral and sea growths, pearls and sponge. Transformations like these are everywhere in the paintings; they are part of the morphic vocabulary which also includes amalgamation of biomorphic and mechanical parts, each with their specialised kinds of energy compacted into a common drive.'