PROVENANCE
Isaacs Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Milan
Modern and Contemporary Art, Cambi Casa d'Aste, July 5, 2023, lot 58
Private Collection, Florida

The prairies were a perennial subject for Kurele, whose paintings often turned to nostalgic recollections of his childhood or vignettes of the immigrant communities of the area as their subjects. At their most they were grounded in depictions of affective humanity staking out a life in an often indifferent wilderness. Where animals appear as subjects, they are generally limited to the immediacy of the farm or the home: cows driven in the fields, chickens wrangled in the yard, or dogs and cats resting at the hearth. When wildlife is seen, it is usually kept at a distance - birds rising from a far treeline, or held back at the periphery of domestic life.

This dreamlike work presents perhaps a different view of life on the prairies, one centered on the natural world still eking out a life at the margins of the farms Kurelek grew up in. Here, a hare in its winter coat dashes across the silent, snow-covered field. A pair of tracks ahead of it suggests that it’s following another hare that has already gone ahead. A waning moon bathes the landscape in a soft blue glow, while the sky is dotted with distant starlight. The bright red barn and white house at the far edge situate this quiet scene against the agrarian setting that Kurelek so closely identified with - showing the prairie landscape as still lively and animated beneath the surface of waking experience of the farming community.

This work was made as a preparatory sketch for a lithograph print by the same title, produced in a numbered edition of 50 at Toronto’s Open Studio - one of ten prints Kurelek produced there between 1973 and 1976.

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