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115 Colin Middleton RHA RUAMBE (1910-1983)
Female Landscape
Watercolour, 13.5 x 18cm (5¼ x 7¼”)
Signed
€300 - 500
116 Colin Middleton RHA RUAMBE (1910-1983)
Surrealist Composition with Girl, Bell and Bird
Oil on board, 61 x 61cm (24 x 24”)
Studio stamp verso
Provenance: ‘Colin Middleton Studio Sale’ Christies London 4th October 1985 where purchased Cat. No. 184 (illustrated)
Surrealist Composition with Girl, Bell and Bird
was probably painted around 1974, between Colin Middleton’s two major late achievements,
the Wilderness andWesterness cycles.The 1970s marked Middleton’s return to an engagement with Surrealism, which he had first explored
in the 1930s at a point when only a handful of artists working in Britain were committed to this movement.
Middleton’s early surrealist works, however, appear more emotionally inspired and more unsettling in tone, experimenting with a range
of subversive Jungian imagery to explore the psychological and physical experience of a war-ravaged world. In the 1970s Middleton’s
surrealism seems less visceral and more self-consciously inventive, demonstrating his remarkable skill to interrelate a series of fantastical
ideas to create a pictorial logic that fully engages the viewer.
There is a sense of ceremony or performance in the present work.This is presented within a shallow space that still hints at a larger landscape
and it appears as if the figure has emerged from the boxes beside her that form part of a drawn-in contraption that is ambiguous in its
action or intention.While the bell can suggest transition amongst many other meanings, the bird is often used in Middleton’s work in close
conjunction with a female figure to represent their spiritual or non-physical aspects. Middleton creates a world in parallel to ours to explore
ideas that transcend the physical but, as in the Wilderness Series, he sets out an intriguing puzzle without defining an answer.
Dickon Hall
€10,000 - 15,000
