
Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
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Sold for £38,812.50 inc. premium
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Head of UK and Ireland

Head of Department

Director
Provenance
With Waddington Galleries, London, where acquired by the late husband of the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.
The present work belongs to a series of oils, gouaches and screen-prints Patrick Heron executed throughout the 1970s titled 'Mini'. These bijou compositions, reduced to the simplest of components; colour and form – possess much of the power and arguably greater allure of their larger counterparts. The scale of Heron's work varied considerably at this stage, with some canvases dated to the decade spanning more than fifteen feet. Yet no greater weight should be awarded to these than more the intimate works, as the Artist comments the two extremes are indistinctly linked:
'Physical scale – this is always the greatest mystery. With your feet in a rock-pool, looking down, you suddenly read promontories, lake, islets, bays and fjords into the minutely ragged edges of the pool's surface as it eats into the granite, imaging yourself looking down from 30,000 feet up. And of course, there really is an exact relationship between the most minute geological manifestations and the coastlines on a map: the calligraphic linear patterns patent in the smallest surface of a granite pebble do precisely coincide with western coastlines on the Ordnance Survey map. The design is the same whether the jagged or rippling contour is contained within a yard of the rock-pool's edge or extends along 100 miles of coast. Smaller suggests bigger." (Patrick Heron, The Observer Magazine, 24 August 1980).
Please note this lot was included in the Small is Beautiful exhibition at Angela Flowers Gallery, London, December 1974-January 1975