Marni vs. Jackson

My latest purchase, is a wonderful new frock from Marni Skillings. Its a little Jackson Pollock inspired, think Blue Poles: Number 11, 1973. This now iconic work, which is in the NGV Collection, was purchased in 1952 amongst a sea of controversy, namely due to its world record price tag.

This text piece on the work below is from the NGV website.

Painted relatively late in Jackson Pollock’s career, this painting conveys the unique skill that Pollock had by now achieved with his infamous ‘drip’ technique. Executed on unstretched canvas laid flat on the floor, both the artist’s dripping, splashing and pouring of paint onto the work’s surface and the scale of the painting itself, clearly reveals the highly physical aspect of Pollock’s technique. It could equally be regarded as a performance. Pollock believed that his abandonment of traditional painting tools (he preferred to use sticks, cooking basters or pour directly from the paint can) and the paintings he produced reflected the realms of unconscious experience but also responded to contemporary life. As he stated: “The modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any past culture”.