Henry Orlik: Cosmos of Dreams Part Two: Marlborough

THIS AUCTION HAS CLOSED

Henry Orlik and his advisors have been positively overwhelmed with the number of visitors that have travelled so far and visited the second selling exhibition at The Little Gallery in Marlborough. The incredible admiration Henry’s work has received has been extraordinary. Many more visitors want to see Henry’s work next week and with this in mind, and the fact that further discussions take place next week about plans for a TV documentary regarding Henry’s story and separately plans are forming for publishing a catalogue raisonne for Henry’s Art,  we have decided to extend the selling exhibition until Tuesday 17th September and lots will be sold via the time online platform commencing at 12.00. The bidding platform will be open to receive registrations as normal. 

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact our team.

In 1974 Henry Orlik’s (b.1947) work was included alongside great Surrealist artists such as René Magritte, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali in Surrealist Masters (Acoris, The Surrealist Art Centre, Brook Street, London). In the years following the exhibition Orlik created some of his most exciting and dynamic work but due to his increasingly reclusive lifestyle many of these works have remained hidden and unseen.

Orlik’s work explores the breadth of human experience. His paintings, formed of thousands of tiny, spiralled brushstrokes, which Orlik refers to as his ‘excitations’, suffuse the solid and often monumental forms depicted with energy and vitality. Orlik took the term excitations from his reading on quantum physics as the term is used to describe the excited state of an entity reacting to a stimulus. Like atoms and electrons, the elements of Orlik’s work are full of energy and motion; undulating waves, rippling fabric, moving aircraft and writhing bodies create the impression that the canvas is in the process of rearranging itself into some new scene or figure.

These dream-like paintings examine the fluid nature of time, space, memory and experience and are not bound by rules of reality. His extraordinary, sensual and witty images cohere into seemingly rational worlds which somehow, by a trick of memory perhaps or déjà vu, seem strangely familiar and intelligible.

Recent exhibitions and scholarship have examined the spread of Surrealism beyond the boundaries of interwar France, exploring the influence of Surrealist artists and their ideals on postwar, international artists in Britain and beyond. Whilst André Breton’s Surrealist movement died with the onset of the Second World War artists such as Henry Orlik demonstrate that the artistic impulse to depict the unconscious and surreal extended further into the 20th century.

Visitor information

Ends 17 September at 12.00  (Monday - Saturday 10am - 5pm)
Location: The Little Gallery, 1-2 The Parade, Marlborough, Wiltshire SN8 1NE

For all enquiries please contact enquiries@winsorbirch.com