Untitled Abstraction by Raymond John Mead

Provenance:
Private Collection, Nova Scotia

Literature:
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto, 2007, page 106

Ray Mead moved to Montreal in 1958, five years following the formation of Painters Eleven in Toronto, to work as the art director for an advertising agency. His paintings began to evoke an influence of the prominent Quebec artist group Les Plasticiens. Mead abandoned oil paint for acrylic, and adopted an approach of hard-edge abstraction. “Untitled Abstraction” (1982) demonstrates this new direction Mead took in his artwork in the years following his move to Montreal. Roald Nasgaard comments on Mead’s stylistic development in these years, remarking that “during the later 1970s and early 1980s many of his paintings were executed in response to post-painterly Colour Field painting: flat fields of colour in simple geometric orderings.” In “Untitled Abstraction”, the artist created a dialogue between complementary colours red and green, and formed a structure that still includes controlled, clean, lines as well as spontaneous drippings of paint, so as to not fully adhere to the reductive minimalist abstraction. The year 1982 also marks a mid-career retrospective of Mead’s work at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa curated by Joan Murray, which was praised for the artist’s striking frankness and emotional depth in his mature work.