PRICE: $10,000

PROVENANCE
Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, Vancouver
Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, Heffel Fine Art Auction House, May 17, 2011, lot 8
Dr. Luigi Rossi
Estate of Dr. Luigi Rossi

LITERATURE
Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt, 1990, page 118

The late 1960s found Jack Shadbolt re-evaluating his past imagery while assembling his 1969 retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which included native themes of the late 1940s and ritual and fetish themes of the 1950s. In the winter of 1968 / 1969, he painted at his summer home at Downes Point on Hornby Island. Once used by First Nations people as a graveyard, the point was also said to be haunted by the spirit of a female shaman. Shadbolt was also working out his feelings about Emily Carr and the spell her work had cast on him. Out of this fertile ground emerged the Fetish series. Shadbolt described it as a “ritual presentation through fetishistic masks and devices”, and produced works on this theme until the early 1970s. Dominated on the left by a towering headdress-like form, this dramatic work also includes biomorphic forms that undulate on the right, painted with rich purple, pink, yellow and orange. Fetish Mask Motifs is an important early example of what would become Shadbolt’s highly acclaimed Fetish series. Mysterious and powerful, Fetish Mask Motifs manifests Shadbolt’s inner shaman – the artist who mediates between the worlds.

For the biography on Dr. Luigi Rossi in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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