Beschreibung:

SHEEP CARCASS FLOATING, 1961 Barrie Cooke HRHA (b.1931)
Signature: signed and dated mid-right; inscribed with title on reverse and with original exhibition label on reverse Medium: oil on board Dimensions: 21 by 37cm., 8.25 by 14.5in. Provenance: Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin; Whence purchased by Sir Basil Goulding in 1962; Goulding dispersal sale, 1982; Private collection Exhibited: 'Barrie Cooke', Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, March - April 1962, catalogue no. 4; 'Paintings and Sculpture from the Collection of the late Sir Basil Goulding, Bart.', Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, 2-18 December 1982, catalogue no. 26 Literature: John Montague, ‘Barrie Cooke’, essay printed in The Irish Imagination 1959-1971, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, exhibition catalogue, p. 52 John Montague writes: Cooke’s “passionate identification with the process of change was responsible for the carcass paintings. There animal life was seen at the point where it bleeds back into the cea... aseless regenerative flux, the spirals of the ribcage outlining the same resistance as the stones in the riverbed; there is even a painting called Sheep Carcass Floating. This was not a new interest for Cooke (he spent a summer in an abattoir in Martinique when he was 21) but the reverse aspect of his general obsession with growth, fertility, energy”. Another work from this series, titled Carcass of a Sheep, 1962, is in the collection of the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny more