Page 65 - The Pioneers, November 26, 2016 Hong Kong

Willem de Kooning, Door to the River, 1960, Whitney Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen
Museum of American Art, New York 哥本哈根 蒂沃利花園
© 2016 The Willem de Kooning Foundation /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
威廉・德・庫寧 《通往河流的門》 1960年作 紐約惠特尼美國藝術博物館

Painted in 1964, Tivoli, Copenhagen (Lot 2507) is swirling lines of differing colours of white, turquoise
representative of Joya's work in the 1960s, and was and black which evoke a sense of movement in
created at the height of Jose Joya's career, amidst contrast to the larger overall main colour field.
some of his most triumphant accomplishments. Likely Joya redefines his own artistic legacy, distilling any
executed during his travels in Europe, Joya visited the remaining subjective elements into purely sensory
Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen - one of the world's oldest impressions of light and gestural movement. True
gardens and theme parks and decided to pay homage to abstract expressionist elements, the painting
to the beautiful park with its exotic architecture, historic exemplifies Joya's working styles along with his
buildings and lush gardens blooming with flora. The inner psyche and process of exploration. The
gardens are especially charming at night, lit up with weightless beauty of Tivoli evokes a lush homage
thousands of lights and lanterns hanging from trees, to nature and place, while affirming Joya's seamless
creating a wondrous and timeless nostalgic atmosphere integration of the modernist aesthetic with an
which exists to the present day. abiding Eastern sensibility.

Joya recreates the traditional landscape painting, "When an idea evolves, particularly an intense
breaking away from conventional norms, recreating idea, I try to record the idea before it flees. The
a boundless horizon across a broad dominant pictures are done spontaneously - the creative
orange pictorial plane, heavy with textural impasto impulse of the moment is strapped to the canvas
and visual complexity, perhaps symbolising the before it changes its nature."
thousands of fairy-lights coming alive at dusk.
The painting is fused with both spontaneity and - Jose Joya, Contemporary Philippine Art: From the
improvisation, resisting any typical methods of Fifties to the Seventies, Vera-Reyes Inc., Manila, 1972
characterisation, with an emphasis on the gestural

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