Sydney Ball ... one of Australia’s most acclaimed masters of abstraction.

Sydney Ball Canto No. XXX 1966. On loan from the Estate of Elwyn Lynn © the artist.

Sydney Ball: The Colour Paintings — a master's work on tour

Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest, Penrith
8 November 2008–25 January 2009

McClelland Gallery & Sculpture Park, Melbourne
22 February–26 April 2009

The Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide
11 November 2009–14 February 2010

Sydney Ball is one of Australia’s most acclaimed masters of abstraction. Sydney Ball: The Colour Paintings provides a timely opportunity, with Ball turning 75 in October this year, to review his remarkable oeuvre. Drawing from public and private collections, the exhibition examines the interests that have consumed this prolific and committed artist: abstraction and colour. Curator Anne Loxley’s selection brings together the finest examples of work from all of Ball’s colour periods — from his flat colour beginnings to gestural abstraction and his eventual return to flat colour.

The exhibition begins with the series that announced Ball in New York City, his celebrated Canto series (1964–66), which located expanses of colour in circular formats on contrasting backgrounds, the circle design creating energetic tension within the square of the canvas. Ball states It wasn’t until getting to New York (in 1963) and seeing solo exhibitions, especially at the Museum of Modern Art, that I wanted to eliminate the peripheral marks and concentrate on colour itself.

The symmetry and the geometry of the Cantos was followed by the arabesque and fluid lines of the Persian series (1966–68), which was inspired by the themes and motifs of Middle Eastern art and architecture. Three Persian works were exhibited in the landmark Field exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968. In the Modular series (1968-69) Ball experimented with shaped, assembled canvases to create sculptural, explosive forms.

Where the 1960s can be seen as a period of sustained experimentation with flat colour, during the 1970s Ball made a dramatic break, replacing precision with spontaneous splashes, drips and stains of high key colour, resulting in the monumental Stain series (1971–1979).

The Stains are followed in Loxley’s selection by Ball’s return to flat colour abstraction with the Structure series (2002 – present) after a twenty-year period of figurative experimentation.

They are not a record of an event stated the artist, but they are themselves the event.