La Java

Location

Country: Brazil
City: Brasilia
Place: British Embassy

Bursting with energy, the deeply saturated colours and forms in Mario Dubsky’s 'La Java' are thinly painted, revealing the canvas weave and undercoats beneath. An abstract composition, its biomorphic shapes hint at living forms or branches. Commenting on his late 1960s works, Dubsky described ‘an underlying figurative concern, partially submerged by abstract forms and heady colour, in which rhythm and colour were pitched against each other.’

International travel in the 1950s and 1960s influenced Dubsky’s work. At the 1956 Venice Biennale he was drawn to ‘the colour, energy and social concerns’ of works by Latin American artists; while works such as 'La Java', painted a decade later, revealed a Mediterranean sensibility of light and colour.

Dubsky’s work from the 1960s also reveals his exploration of his identity as a queer artist and his increasing awareness of political issues. Arriving in New York in 1969, just after the Stonewall Riots, catalysed a self-realisation of the power of art to express political issues. In 1971 he and John Button were commissioned to produce a photomontaged mural for the Firehouse, the Gay Activists Alliance building in New York’s SoHo district – later destroyed by arson. Back in the UK in the 1970s, Dubsky returned to more figurative work, and continued to support political issues. His series of drawings, 'Tom Pilgrim’s Progress Along the Consequences of Christianity' was published in response to the Gay News blasphemy trial of 1977.

Places

Subjects

abstract

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

Mario Peter Dubsky (1939 - 1985)

Title

La Java

Date

c.1966-1969

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 183.50 cm, width: 183.50 cm

Acquisition

Presented by the artist's family, December 2004

Inscription

bl: la Java ; verso bl: 202

Provenance

the artist's family

GAC number

17894