
Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
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Head of UK and Ireland

Head of Department

Director
Provenance
The Artist's Estate, where purchased by the present owner
Exhibited
London, The Redfern Gallery, Large Abstracts, 4 September-4 October 2019
During the early 1960s Heath's work increased in scale, the largest seen to date, resulting from his reaction to the American abstract expressionists and in particular the work of Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. But unlike the Americans, Heath's paintings emerged from his preliminary drawings, either of landscapes or figures, and in this sense were not as spontaneous as they first appear. The period witnessed noticeable change in Heath's paintings, at a time when Hanover Gallery in London staged three separate exhibitions from 1959-1962. By the final instalment, softer more fluid forms had taken over from the geometric, hard-edged shapes Heath had built his early career on. This is particularly evident with Divided: Red and Orange painted in 1963, during which time the artist increasingly introduced the female figure into his work. Their sexual and erotic ambiguity drew criticism from some quarters; in Almost White (private collection), 1964, for instance, a naked seated female form is presented head on with crossed legs, but it takes some imagination to discern the body parts. Yet mere representation was not the artist's interest. He was seeking something more spiritual and veiled, as Jane Rye comments:
"The smell of flesh" was what he was after, he told Francis Bacon when he met his Hanover Gallery stable-mate in the street one morning and took him back to the studio to view the paintings; Bacon, something of an expert on the subject, replied that he succeeded admirably.' (Jane Rye, Adrian Heath, Lund Humphries, Farnham, Surrey, 2012, p.149).
Please note that this lot will be transferred to Cadogan Tate on Thursday 1 July.