Sold for: $55,250

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Ontario

LITERATURE
Johanne Sloan, Joyce Wieland: Life & Work, Art Canada Institute, 2014, page 6, reproduced page 17

Joyce Wieland is regarded as one of Canada’s first feminist artists, and her retrospective at the National Gallery in 1971 was the first one for a female artist. She was well known for her consideration of issues of feminism and Canadian national identity, and called herself a “cultural activist.” In 1962, Wieland and her husband, artist Michael Snow, relocated from Toronto to New York, where they would stay until 1971. This was an exciting time of experimentation for Wieland, and in addition to painting, she became involved with the underground filmmaking community there. Johanne Sloan writes that “Wieland’s work from these years shows how responsive she was to the period’s key artistic currents, such as Pop art and Conceptual art, though her interpretations of them were always original and idiosyncratic.” The Battery (possibly a reference to the tip of Manhattan Island), which incorporates signs, text and film-like sequences of images, is an outstanding work from this period. The repetition of the woman’s head in the work could also be seen as a reference to Snow’s iconic Walking Woman series, in which he used repetition of figures and parts of figures.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars