Still life with leaf

Details

John Banting (1902-1972)
Still life with leaf
signed and dated 'John Banting/1966' (lower right)
watercolour, gouache and charcoal
21 ½ x 29 ¼ in. (54.5 x 75 cm.)

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

Lot Essay

Still Life with Leaf shows how organicity and vegetable growth are central to the suspension of geometrical shapes, echoing the balance which the mind attempts to create in ones relationships with reality. The energy, inseparable from the work, testifies to the energy of creation in the painter, himself the seat of the tension between growth and flight on the one hand and stability and fixity on the other.
These three works (see also lots 17 and 20) by Banting summarise his own obsession between life and death, movement and immobility, the rational and the irrational, what man wants to master and what proves to be unmasterable.

M.R.

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