Banyon Wall

This monumental painting by Sydney Ball is the first and largest work from his Modular series, created in Adelaide between 1968 and 1969. Consisting of multiple and varying shaped canvases, which together produce a unified whole, the series radically expanded Ball’s investigations of the sculptural dimensions of colour field painting. Many of the works from the Modular series tested perceptions of spatial depth by incorporating negative space into the picture plane. However, with Banyon Wall it is the central yellow field, with its surrounding blue, green and red panels, that optically pushes and pulls the eye between deep and shallow pictorial space.

Ball’s consideration of the material, form and colour of painting as a subject in itself, was in tune with critic Clement Greenberg’s famous statement that ‘art is a matter strictly of experience’. His direct exposure to Greenberg and the American Abstract Expressionists in New York during the 1960s had a profound influence on his development as one of Australia’s most influential and enduring abstract artists.

Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture