Notes

Norman Catherine’s interest in exploring psychological states and portraying dream-like conditions goes back to the 1980s, and it remains an important subject of his spirited painterly output. This lot is characteristic of a tendency in Catherine’s paintings from the mid-2000s. A time of renewal and consolidation for the artist, Catherine produced a number of crowded canvases populated with montages of beastly characters drawn from his earlier paintings and sculptures. This painting is similar in style and form to Headgear (2005) and Soliloquy (2007): Catherine presents a vivid figural assembly on a tonally muted background. Catherine mainly limits himself to red and blue to fill out the various figures rendered in black and white. His figures range from cartoonish humans to all sorts of animals (cats, hyenas, sharks, rabbits, leopards). His animals are typically anthropomorphised, and here juxtaposed with inanimate objects such as a ladder, torch and bed. The bed is a ritual site of dreaming in Catherine’s paintings. The light shades read as quotes of Philip Guston and Robert Hodgins, like-minded painters who also embraced caricature and flatness as qualities of contemporary figure painting. Sean O’Toole