Notes

In this work, Anton Uys embraces the principles of post-painterly abstraction with its hard edges and flat painted surfaces. He also engages with the aesthetics of Op Art where colour and shape are deployed to create playful visual illusions of depth and perspective on a flat surface. In the present lot, the row of pale, hollow, rectangular forms beside a row of solid similar forms coloured in wavy bands, continue into the distance almost to a point of infinity. The complex interrelationship of the angular forms perplexes the viewer and challenges the eye to disentangle the geometry of the composition.

Exhibited

Ansdell Gallery, London, Anton Uys: Paintings, Collages, Graphics, 8 April 1975-27 April 1975, illustrated in colour on the cover of the exhibition invitation.

Literature

Michael Stevenson and Annabel Rosholt (2003). Moving in Time and Space: Shifts between Abstraction and Representation in Post-War South African Art, Cape Town: Michael Stevenson Contemporary. A similar example is illustrated in colour on page 40.