.jpg?w=1)
PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF JASIA REICHARDTI met Richard Lin in 1958, at the Art News and Review, a fortnightly art newspaper for which we were both working. Even though his real name was Lin Show-Yu, he was already calling himself Richard. Every two weeks Richard would come to the office, which was in London's Regent Street, to collect the papers and to deliver copies to bookshops around Charing Cross Road. The Review, printed on newsprint in black and white apart from the red banner on the cover, aimed at reviewing every exhibition. It was possible, at the time, to make a round of the London galleries in one afternoon. Not only did we meet in the office, we had quickly discovered that we lived in the same street. In his flat the main room with curved French windows and a curved door was bare. There was a table with chairs, a settee, and a wooden floor. There was nothing on the walls. The colours were white, beige and brown. To hang his paintings in the living room would have disturbed him. The spaces where he worked and where he lived with his wife Ann had to be different, and very different they were. However, despite their obvious differences the living space and Richard's works shared something significant: a characteristic unprecedented at the time, both were minimal. There was nothing in them that wasn't strictly necessary.Richard Lin's 1958 paintings had a texture, a mixed colour and an agitated surface, but gradually, and certainly within a couple of years, his paintings achieved a uniform, luminous patina with limitation of colour and purity of line. The colours faded from blue to black to grey creating a smooth transition occasionally interrupted by a thin line, a stripe, or a circle. There was delicacy in the progress from one form to another. The paintings didn't have titles, instead there were descriptions associated with what one could see on the canvas, whether squares, circles, lines and metal discs or squares. Catalogues of his exhibitions also featured a list of materials used. But whereas this was true of the early work of the 1960s and 1970s, the later paintings became more complex. It was during those two earlier decades when we spent a lot of time together that I acquired a few of his works.During the 1980s, after leaving the UK, Richard continued to send me catalogues of his exhibitions. I was surprised when I saw them, to find that while the works were identifiably his, they were more complex and there were also some sculptures. Unexpectedly, most of the works had titles, some of them romantic about seasons or people, and sometimes just telling us what the image was about. Thinking about his work now I realised that the development of Richard's work was like a continuous walk along a circular route discovering new depths in a landscape he knew well.Jasia Reichardt, private correspondence, July 2018.
Richard Lin (Lin Show-Yu) (1933-2011)
Square, Circle, Line
細節
Richard Lin (Lin Show-Yu) (1933-2011)
Square, Circle, Line
signed and dated 'Lin 1961' (lower left)
pencil, oil and gouache on paper
16 7/8 x 21½ in. (42.8 x 54.6 cm.)
Executed in 1961.
Square, Circle, Line
signed and dated 'Lin 1961' (lower left)
pencil, oil and gouache on paper
16 7/8 x 21½ in. (42.8 x 54.6 cm.)
Executed in 1961.
來源
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in the early 1960s.
拍場告示
Please note that this lot is subject to Artist Resale Right and not as stated in the printed catalogue.
榮譽呈獻
Pippa Jacomb