Stephen Bush (Australian, b. 1958)Pomme de TerreNo visible signature.
Oil on paper, 17 7/8 x 25 in. (45.5 x 63.5 cm), framed.
Condition: Mounted to paper, unevenly trimmed u.l., some adhesive residue visible on mount, gentle rippling, floated within the frame, not examined out of frame.
Provenance: John L. Stewart Collection, New York, through to the current private collection, New Hampshire.
N.B. Stephen Bush creates distinct series of works, each focusing on a particular motif—an elephant, an explorer, beekeepers, farm equipment, and trash cans, among other characters, objects, and landscapes. Committed to representational painting and a student of historical Western European techniques and processes, Bush applies a classical style to unromantic modern subjects, like the trash bins in his
Pomme de Terre series. While the subject seems simple enough, the title does not match ("pomme de terre" is the French term for potato). Potatoes are another of the repeated motifs in Bush's œuvre, and the trash can series resulted from the artist's 1996 residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, during which he drew a potato each day and then ate the potato he had used as his model. At the end of the residency, he threw all of his potato drawings into a green trash bin. The narrative of the potatoes disappears from all but the title of the
Pomme de Terre series, lost in the inexpressive, objective depiction of the trash bins.
Condition
Condition: Framed dimensions: 23 3/4 x 30 3/4 x 1 in.
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