Artwork by William Perehudoff,  AC-83-92

William Perehudoff
AC-83-92

acrylic on canvas
signed, titled and dated 1983 on the reverse
40 x 52 ins ( 101.6 x 132.1 cms )

Auction Estimate: $15,000.00$12,000.00 - $15,000.00

Price Realized $21,240.00
Sale date: November 19th 2019

Provenance:
Waddington Galleries, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto
Literature:
Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Toronto/Vancouver, 2007, page 287
William Perehudoff began his artistic career as a watercolourist while continuing to experiment with transparencies and opacities in pigments throughout his later career as a colour field painter. In “AC-83-92”, a wash of thinned aqua pigment on the unprimed canvas creates a soft foundation layer to the composition. Producing vibrant contrast and energy, the artist then applied large dabs of intense and contrasting multicoloured paint across the canvas. These thick strokes of colour, painted with a glossy, tactile surface, appear to be floating amid the calm space behind them, like a blue sky. The three-dimensional quality of the final surface layer adds a sculptural element and further dimension to the image. Roald Nasgaard notes how Perehudoff’s abstract works of the 1980s exhibit “plays of light and dark, of transparency and opacity, [which] are subtle and sensuous.”

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William Perehudoff
(1919 - 2013) RCA

William Perehudoff was born in Langham, Saskatchewan and maintained a connection to this area throughout his life. In 1944, the Saskatoon Art Centre opened, and this provided Perehudoff with early and important access to art. Within a couple of years he was exhibiting regularly in group exhibitions such as the Saskatoon Exhibition and the Art Centre fall show. Throughout this phase of his development as an artist, he farmed in the summer and devoted himself to painting and his art education in the winter. Like many artists of the time, Perehudoff had been influenced by the motivations and methodologies of social realist artists such as Diego Rivera.  Perehudoff took instruction from the influential French muralist Jean Charlot, as well as Amédé Ozenfant in New York, the French Purist and associate of Le Corbusier.  Kenneth Noland, a very important colour field painter, was also a major influence to his work. Since the 1960s, Perehudoff was a central figure in Canadian abstraction. The effect of the flat plains and open skies that are so dramatically present throughout Saskatchewan seem to be detectable in his work. William Perehudoff received the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1994 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Regina in 2003. He was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 1998.