The Estate of Stacha Halpern
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Stacha Halpern
Carcass, 1967
Catalogue number: 10
oil on paper
25.50 x 16.00
unsigned; inscribed 'Boeuf Melbourne' on reverse
Stacha Halpern - Canvas, Paper, Clay, Charles Nodrum Gallery, 21 Sept - 9 Oct, 1999, no. 24
An excerpt from Charles Nodrum's introduction to a 1996 Halpern exhibition:
"Halpern stares at sides of beef with the same fascinated revulsion that Roquentin gazed at the roots of trees, and his paint has the same enticingly dangerous tactility that Sartre’s hero found in rain-sodden newspapers. But Halpern is even closer to the meat (literally and figuratively) in that he seems to handle his knife like the butcher handles his: the paint goes on the canvas like a steak being sliced off the bone. And on a deeper level it gets more serious: in a brief introduction to one of Halpern’s exhibitions, Raymond Queneau tells the story of a woman who was so shocked by the sight of a slab of beef on a butcher’s block that she lost all her vital instincts and wasted away till she died of starvation: the sudden confrontation with her own flesh, and death, was just too much for her. In this context, the carcass of beef becomes a metaphor for the human body and the whole series of paintings takes on a further dimension as a grim, even grisly meditation on death."
Exhibition Catalogue
Since its establishment in 1984, the Charles Nodrum Gallery’s exhibition program embraces a diversity of media and styles - from painting, sculpture & works on paper to graphics and photography; from figurative, geometric, gestural, surrealist & social comment to installation & conceptually based work.