Additional Images

Provenance:

Downstairs Gallery, Edmonton
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:

Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, Douglas & McIntyre Ltd., Vancouver, 2007, page 291.

Note:

William Perehudoff (1918-2013) was an important proponent of abstract art in Canada, particularly in the prairies. He was born in a Doukhobor community near Saskatoon, and over the course of his career, developed an individual approach to post-painterly abstraction. Attending the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops intermittently between 1957 and 1990, Perehudoff met Clement Greenberg in 1962, and was particularly taken with the work of Kenneth Noland whose workshop he attended in 1963. He had been painting abstracts before this time, but Perehudoff’s paintings become increasingly pared-down as he began to tackle similar issues as other colour field painters, such as Jack Bush. Karen Wilkin has commented that Perehudoff’s work of the mid-1970s demonstrated his ongoing technical exploration of the effects of bringing together changes of colour with changes of density and reflectiveness. This exploration probably explains the artist’s adopting a system of numbering his work (AC 76/27, for example) as a way of keeping track of his progress. For Andante, Perehudoff began with a complex underpainting, over which he would add washes of unifying tones. The bands of colour react to each other up and down the rich, horizontally-streaked ground uniting the formal elements: although a figure-ground relationship exists, Perehudoff has preserved the integrity of the picture plane, so important to colour field painters.