Waterpond in a Landscape III
Fred Williams
Details
- Artist
- Fred Williams
- Title
- Waterpond in a Landscape III
- Year
- 1966
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Size
- 152.5 x 122 cm
- Details
Waterpond in a landscape III is an impressive and highly accomplished work that was painted during a period of maturation and consolidation. For the first time Williams was experiencing widespread critical success and he was intent on testing his own art against examples of local and international abstraction. This painting stands out as an early exploration of how he pared works back, yet was still able to maintain a strong resemblance to what he had observed. Williams conveys the essential characteristics of the pond environment but it is also modified in quite radical ways.
...
The three pond paintings have had an impressive exhibition history. Following their initial 1966 showing at Rudy Komon Art Gallery, Sydney, they were brought together for Williams’s first retrospective exhibition, initiated by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in 1988. Two of the works and the related Landscape with water ponds, 1965-67, were also featured in the most recent NGA retrospective held in 2012. The warm palette combined with a minimalist vocabulary have continued to excite admirers of Williams’s work.
This is an extract from the catalogue essay by Rodney James, 2017
© The Estate of Fred Williams
Provenance
Rudy Komon, Sydney
private collection, Sydney
Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne 1985
private collection, Sydney
Literature
McCaughey.,P., Fred Williams, Bay Books,1980, illus. p176