The National Gallery of Victoria claimed in 2002 that Ball ‘established himself as a prophet at home by generating large canvases dominated by bold pattern and flat, opaque colour that seemed to have no precedent in Australian culture’.
Ball’s work has a bold yet lyrical style of abstraction, in which his prime concern was the relationship of colours and the dramatic effects created from splashes of paint.
Absaroka Light is a major example of Ball’s Stain Paintings. The Stain Paintings focused on the action of producing fields of colour. The surface of the painting is both drawn to attention and obscured by the sweeping movement of paint across the canvas, capturing and flattening the immediacy of multiple moments in time.
This work is on long-term loan from the Federal Government’s Artbank Collection.
Sydney Ball
Absaroka Light, 1973
Enamel and synthetic polymer paint on canvas
488.5mm W x 275mm H x 7mm D
