24
RICHARD KILLEEN - People Passing 1969
Estimate:
$25,000 - $35,000
Sold
$46,000
Live Auction
The Silich Collection Part 1
ARTIST
RICHARD KILLEEN (b. 1946)
Size
68.4 x 68.5
Description
Oil on board
Signature
Signed & dated 9/1969
Provenance
Important Works of Art, Webb’s 27/03/2012
Literature
Richard Killeen has been an exhibiting artist since 1967, with
dealers in Sydney and New York. Locally he is represented by
Ivan Anthony and Peter McLeavey galleries who have placed
his works in major corporate and private collections as well as
in the collection of each of the major metropolitan public art
galleries. There are twenty works in the Museum of New Zealand
Te Papa Tongarewa and Killeen’s Post-Modern cut-out series
was the subject of Francis Pound’s 1987 PhD dissertation. Major
exhibitions devoted to his practice have toured nationally, a
distinction previously reserved for first generation modernists
Gordon Walters and Colin McCahon.
The son of a signwriter, and with Irish Catholic ancestry, Killeen
first came to prominence as a 19-year-old at the Elam School
of Fine Arts in 1965 when one of his painting tutors, Colin
McCahon, chose him as his assistant on a large commission to
paint windows for the Convent Chapel of the Sisters of Our Lady
of the Missions in Upland Road, Remuera. The windows are now
in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery.
McCahon noticed that Killeen’s compositions seemed assembled
from separate parts, like jigsaw puzzle pieces with stylised figures
rendered as flattened shapes applied over a neutral background,
casting no shadows. Here the simple primary colours of red,
blue and yellow brighten the representation of the banality of
everyday life as figures cross in two directions on a city street.
This painting relates to American Pop Art, but also responds
to local traditions of Realism which had been dominated by
landscape. Neatly attired in suits and shift dresses of a respectable
length, Killeen’s figures are city slickers not country hicks; he is
characterising New Zealanders as sophisticated and urbane.
Using the frame to cut off the figures draws attention to the
artificial nature of this realist construction, allowing investigation
of figure and field as image and pattern and lending the image a
mysterious, symbolic quality.
LINDA TYLER
