SEVEN PEOPLE IN THE SNOW, 1975
IVAN DURRANT
synthetic polymer paint on composition board
113.5 x 174.5 cm
signed and dated lower right: I. DURRANT. ’75.
inscribed with title on label attached verso: SEVEN PEOPLE IN THE SNOW
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
The National Australia Bank Art Collection, acquired from the above in 1975 (label attached verso)
Probably: The Great Fancy Dress Ball, Race Crowds: Ivan Durrant; Recent Paintings, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, September – November 1975
Ivan Durrant, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 12 May - 17 June 1979
The Seventies: Australian Paintings and Tapestries from the Collection of National Australia Bank, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 15 October – 28 November 1982 (label attached verso)
The Seventies Exhibition: Selected Paintings from the National Australia Bank Collection, MacLaurin Hall, The University of Sydney, Sydney, 6 September - 1 October 1989, cat. 10
'The Seventies' Exhibition: Selected Paintings from the National Australia Bank Collection 'Modern Art of the Seventies', Caulfield Arts Complex Gallery, Caulfield City Hall, Melbourne, 18 January - 11 February 1990, cat. 4
The Seventies: Contemporary Australian Paintings from the National Australia Bank Collection, organised by Regional Galleries Association of New South Wales, New South Wales, cat. 10; and touring, Tamworth City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 24 May – 24 June 1990; Dubbo Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, 11 July – 6 August 1990; Wagga Wagga City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 17 August – 10 September 1990; Moree Plains Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 3 October – 31 October 1990
A Day at the Caulfield Races, Caulfield Arts Complex Gallery, Caulfield City Hall, Melbourne, 4 December 1993 - 23 January 1994
Ivan Durrant: Barrier Draw, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, 1 May – 25 October 2020
Catalano, G., ‘Crazy Bugger’, The Bulletin, Sydney, vol. 97, no. 4980, 25 October 1975, pp. 64 – 65
Lindsay, R., The Seventies: Australian Paintings and Tapestries from the Collection of National Australia Bank, The National Bank of Australasia, Melbourne, 1982, pl. 35, p. 48 (illus.)
Clarke, A., 'Collection too good to be dispersed', The Age, Melbourne, 15 October 1982, p. 14 (illus.)
Dickins, B., Ivan Durrant: Barrier Draw, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2020, pp. 56 (illus.), 160
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After moving to Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula in 1970, Ivan Durrant obtained a training licence and began to train his racehorse Gadshill, who had been bought with the proceeds of his first sell-out solo exhibition, The Country Family at Georges Mora’s Tolarno Galleries in St Kilda. The artist’s love of the racetrack and everything associated with it, as well as with cattle and farm life, has been a constant of his career since that time.
Seven People in the Snow was painted in the year that Durrant achieved notoriety for the staging of his ‘Slaughtered Cow Happening’ at the National Gallery of Victoria. On 26 May, the artist deposited the freshly killed carcass of ‘Beverley the cow’ on the museum’s forecourt after informing the gallery’s staff that he was donating a sculpture. A comment on the realities behind society’s consumption of meat – the death of an animal, and widely interpreted as an anti-Vietnam War statement – the subsequent media response was conceived as an essential part of the work. The media responded as if to script, with outraged national TV and newspaper coverage. If not known in every Australian household by name, the artist certainly became known around the country for this action.
By the mid-1970s Durrant had moved away from the dreamlike naïve style of his early paintings to photo-realism, embraced by the artist for the way in which this new technique offered viewers ‘the joy of observation’ and for its ability to ‘freeze the world in its tracks and take a good hard look.’1 He also came to know and admire the work of American Super-Realist painters Chuck Close and Janet Fish at this time, whose work was shown in Melbourne at Tolarno in 19752; inspiring his family’s relocation to New York early in the following year so that they could ‘get over there and mix it’.3 Durrant subsequently developed friendships with Close and Janet Fish, among other artists, while living there.
Durrant began painting scenes from the racetrack in 1975, and he has described Seven People in the Snow as ‘the key one in the racing series and in fact the key painting for the later meat works that followed’.4 Working at his favourite racetrack, Caulfield, and with a new Pentax camera, Durrant’s position above the men enabled him to capture their interactions and body language unobserved, from a bird’s eye perspective. As fellow onlookers, we are left to infer the subject and tone of the punters’ conversation, and to try to perceive whether we have winners or losers below us. The cropping of the legs in the top right-hand corner of the work powerfully conveys the snapshot feel of the painting’s original source, while the tonal range of black, brown and cream in the men’s clothing reinforces the scene’s subdued mood. While we are unable to know if any of the subjects have found themselves richer at this stage of the day, the sheer number of discarded tickets – the work’s ‘snow’, would indicate that there have been far more losers than winners.
1. See Ivan Durrant, ‘Melbourne Artist Ivan Durrant on Super-Realist Art’, https://www.essentialsmagazine.com.au/art/melbourne-artist-ivan-durrant-... (viewed 2 December 2021)
2. Chuck Close’s now-iconic portrait Bob, 1970 in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra was purchased from this exhibition.
3. Ivan Durrant, op. cit.
4. Durrant, I., ‘Artist’s Statement’, The Seventies: Australian Paintings and Tapestries from the Collection of National Australia Bank, National Bank of Australasia, Melbourne, 1982, p. 48
KELLY GELLATLY