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Jeffrey Smart Born in Adelaide in 1921, Jeffrey Smart has been one of Australia’s most well-known artists of the last sixty years. He has based himself in Italy since the 1960s, but holds major exhibitions at least once annually in Australia. The love of the created environment and relationship between buildings and other man-made structures, the cultivated landscape and people in surreal/realism in which the city and its modern constructions and their implied power threaten those who have created them, have been the focus of his art nearly his entire career. The magnificent aquatint on offer, entitled The Dome, is a fine example of Jeffrey Smart’s work. It owes its genesis to Smart coming upon surveyors planning building developments in a field which gave a remarkable vista of St Peter’s in Rome. In the finished work, however, “We seek to measure distance, to understand our position, estimate scale, locate objects. Yet we are at a loss in this sea of grass, and without a secure foundation for the tree, the dome or the foreground pole which we could reach out and grasp, it seems.” Jeffrey Smart, by Peter Quatermaine (1983, p 84). Price on application. |
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