Alun Leach-Jones

Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne;
Mirvac Group, till 2009

Alun Leach Jones, Rudy Komon Gallery, 1982;
The Field Now, Heide Park and Art Gallery, 4 Sept - 21 Oct 1984, no. 23

The Field Now, exhibition catalogue, Heide Park and Art Gallery, 1984, no. 43;
Robert Gray, Graeme Sturgeon and Christopher Gentle, Alun Leach Jones, Craftsman House, 1988, illus plate 16, and Fig 130a for the installation shot of the above Rudy Komon gallery show;

"In 1980 Leach-Jones was invited to live and work in Berlin as Artist in Residence with the German Academic Exchange Service where the groundwork for the series of paintings, the Romance of Death, was laid. the generic title for these paintings seems an unlikely denotation for works which are brimming over with action, colour and light. the title is in fact Leach-Jones esoteric reference to a number of personal characteristics and experiences...in the latest works (referring to the Romance of Death Series) we see the results of his persistence in honing and refining the solutions he has developed to marry these concerns (referring to death and other concerns). the biggest change in his work (as evidenced in this series ) is his restriction of colour essentially to the primaries and for the first time black becomes a major element." Gray, op. cit. p 40

Jonathan Goodman and Rex Butler, Alun Leach Jones - Painting and Sculpture, Marnling Press, Sydney, 2009, illus p 63;

"In the early 1980s. Leach-Jones achieved a breakthrough in compositional structure. In a series entitled the Romance Of Death, he started working with repeated abstract shapes which loop around the canvas and which are played out so that they comprise a balanced field...A considerable leap has been made, for Leach-Jones has found his rhythm with intricate abstraction, in which the ties to the real world of objects are evidently cut. He will go on toward dreams of ever-greater intricacy, remaining poised and upright as he works out schemes that dazzle with the rhythm of accumulated forms." Goodman & Butler, op. cit. p 13