Notes

After years of self-imposed monasticism and a Spartan work regimen while working on the large-scale Discovery mural commission, Preller’s creativity burst out in new and exciting ways from mid-1962 onwards. Energised by a growing interest in abstraction and a fascination with the cosmos and the possibilities of space travel, he set aside the rigorous, controlled, hard-edged, flat technique of the previous decade and revelled in active gesture, luscious colour and fleshy three-dimensional surfaces. As always in his work, references to Quattrocento art history and Greek and Egyptian mythology still come through, but ‘the figure’ is all but gone with this new-found freedom. In the present lot, painted in 1965, the title and the colour palette suggest Sandro Botticelli’s famous masterpiece of the goddess standing on a giant scallop shell, all peachy skintones, luscious pinks and creamy butter yellow hair, set against dark forest greens, but Preller eschews the Renaissance iconography entirely. Instead, the wild burst of dynamic colour and thick impasto suggests the birth of the planet Venus, in a ‘big bang’ of swirling gas and space dust, and a painter actively engaged in a visceral dance with paint and surface and tactility.