GLEESON, JAMES (1915-2008)

**PRICE ON APPLICATION**
 
"Dance To The Music Of Time" (1994)
oil on canvas
131 x 176cm
signed lower left
*private collection, Sydney
 
Gleeson AO was a famous, pioneering Australian Surrealist. Renowned as Australia’s foremost surrealist painter and poet, Gleeson’s oeuvre explores the human condition beyond visible reality and the limitations of the senses through powerful enigmas of fleshy biomorphic, mechanical and illusionistic landscape forms. In addition to his contributions to surrealism, throughout his career Gleeson made important contributions to the Australian art world as a dedicated writer, critic and affiliate of a number of art institutions. Gleeson studied at East Sydney Technical College from 1934-36, and then at the Sydney Teachers’ College from 1937-38 where teacher May Marsden encouraged experimentation. His interest in Poussin, El Greco, Breughel and Blake instilled a love of the classical figure and myth, coupled with a concern for humanity that was deeply impacted by the Depression, the rise of Fascism in Europe and the build-up to the Second World War. From 1938 through the 1940s Gleeson experimented with surrealism and produced apocalyptic evocations of the destructive powers of human nature generated from this atmosphere of uncertainty and tension. Inspired by writers and artists including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Masson, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, he utilised poetry, dream, mythology and chance elements as material for his paintings, collages and drawings. Gleeson is known for his spectacular, large-scale imaginary landscapes in which geological formations mesh with organs, bones and interconnective tissues, symbolic of a macabre, erotic but strangely beautiful subconsciousness.