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Works of art live for generation, bringing new dreams, new ways of seeing and experiencing our world. Be part of this magic world of the finest of art that thrills your heart, mind and soul. Established in 1994, Galeria Aniela is the world’s local fine art gallery, selling high-quality works of art to a worldwide buyer base. We won the trust of some of the most important Australian artists. Galeria Aniela recognizes the importance of the buyer confidence in purchasing an authentic work of art. We offer a stunning selection of paintings and sculpture of impeccable provenance and quality. We combine the knowledge of fine art and financial expertise. Our people focused approach ensures an enjoyable and a rewarding experience.

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Brett Whiteley (1939 – 1992) share on  Share your joy of John Perceval art on facebook   Click - enjoy art, share on your twitter

Biography: Brett Whiteley AO (7 April 193 –15 June 1992) an Australian artist is one of the most famous Australian painters of the twentieth century.

Click to Enlarge: Brett Whiteley AO (1939–1992), Garden (1975) original Ink on Paper on board, Image Size: 85 cm x 75 cm, Framed Size: 122 cm x 108 cm

Artist: Brett Whiteley (1939–1992)

Title: 'Garden' 1975

Medium: original 1975 ink on paper on board

Signed: BW lower right, Artist's stamp upper left and lower right Date inscribed lower right: 21/7/75 Further glimpsing [sic] in 'Garden'

Image Size : 85 cm x 75 cm

Framed Size: 122 cm x 108 cm

'The garden is like a drawing' (said Wendy Whiteley)

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The garden is like a drawing, said Wendy Whiteley

The GARDEN of Wendy  "The garden is like a drawing" says Wendy Whiteley. Wendy Whiteley is the widow of the great Australian artist Brett Whiteley AO (1939– 1992), and the garden isn't officially hers. A stunningly beautiful garden, hidden away down near the water, at Lavender Bay, North Sydney. Random benches in quiet spots, secluded paths, and a spectacular view to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Luscious tree ferns, robust palm trees and a Moreton Bay fig are highlights. And the birdlife has returned, to Wendy's delight. Wendy's artistic talent is evident in the garden. A natural wonderland, a rainforest of sorts, now sits below her Lavender Bay home and stretches along the harbour towards Milsons Point.

"It's like I need some big leaves here because these other ones are all scritchy and scratchy you know, and these things will flower so you will get a bit of colour but this won't. Whiteley garden: Australian Story - Wendy Whiteley 6 Sep 2004 http://www.abc.net.au/austory/content/2004/s1193966.htm 

Threat to secret Whiteley garden - Government - News | Mosman Daily

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Brett Whiteley Biography (1939 - 1992)

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Brett Whiteley AO (7 April 1939 – 15 June 1992) an Australian artist is one of the most famous Australian painters of the twentieth century. Whiteley is known for his skill as a great draughtsman, had many shows in his career, and travelled extensively around the world. Brett Whiteley is represented in all Australian National galleries. He is one of the most important and best loved Australian artists, Whiteley painting sells for record price, his original paintings have sold for many millions dollars. Famous Works: The Soup Kitchen 1958, Red Painting 1960, Alchemy 1972-73, Self Portrait the Studio 1976, The Jacaranda Tree (Sydney Harbour) 1977.

Whiteley 1939 59

Whiteley painting sells for record price.

Brett Whiteley died 15th of June 1992, is the most famous for semi-surreal landscapes, gardens with views of Sydney and nudes. Whiteley's topics also  included portraits, still lifes, birds and abstracts. The Sydney based artist created paintings, drawings and sculpture.  Brett Whiteley was inspired by singers like Bob Dylan and lived the lifestyle of a rock star. He was married to the beautiful Wendy Whiteley who was his "Muse" for a number of years though he lived fast and hard. Whiteley searched for a muse in drugs, just as many rock stars had done before him, but ultimately it was this lifestyle that shortened his life and career.

Awards:
1961 Dyason Bequest, AGNSW;
1961 International Prix at the 2nd Bienalle, Paris
1964 International Drawing Prize, Darmstadt, Germany
1964 Perth Festival Art Prize, Australia
1975 Sir William Anglis Memorial Prize, Melbourne
1976 Archibald Prize for 'Self Portrait in the Studio'
1976 Sulman Prize for 'Interior with Time Past'
1977 Wynne Prize for 'The Jacaranda Tree'
1978 Wynne Prize for 'Summer at Carcoar'
1978 Sulman Prize for 'Yellow Nude'
1978 Archibald Prize for 'Art, Life and the Other Thing'
1984 Wynne Prize for 'South Coast After the Rain'
1991 Awarded the Order of Australia (OA)

Educated at The Scots School, Bathurst and The Scots College, Bellevue Hill, Brett Whiteley started drawing very early in life. While a teenager, he painted on weekends at Bathurst and Sydney with such works as The Soup Kitchen (1958). In 1960, Whiteley left Australia on a Travelling Art Scholarship (judged by Sir Russell Drysdale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales). One of the works he submitted to win the scholarship was Sofala, which he had painted in 1956; it was done in images which were slightly abstracted in brownish colours. After winning the scholarship he travelled around Europe, visiting Italy, France and England. He arrived in London at a time when many Australian artists were becoming popular in England. During this period, there was a fascination with Australian art there, and Australian artists were looked on favourably by the English public. Australian artists Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale had become well known and were exhibiting in London, as well as many other Australian artists who were also there.

After meeting the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, he was included in the group show 'Survey of Recent Australian Painting' where his Untitled Red painting was bought by the Tate Gallery. This made him the youngest artist ever to have been bought by the Tate, and it was this fact which helped him to have even more success, such as when he won the first prize for Australia at the Biennale de la Jeunesse in Paris. During the next few years he had much contact with artists in London and in travels to other parts of the world, and it was these friendships and contacts which helped him to become an accepted artist.

In 1960, aged 21, Whiteley left Australia on a Travelling Art Scholarship (judged by Sir Russell Drysdale at the Art Gallery of New South Wales), and by 1961 had settled in London where his work was shown at the Whitechapel and Marlborough galleries. In London he met many other painters, including fellow Australians, Arthur Boyd and John Passmore.

Whiteley 1960's

In 1962, he married Wendy Julius and their only child, daughter Arkie Whiteley, was born in London in 1964. While in London, Whiteley painted works in several different series: bathing, the zoo and the Christies. His paintings during these years were influenced by the modernist British art of the sixties - particularly the works of William Scott and Roger Hilton - and were of brownish abstract forms. It was these abstracted works which established him as an artist, right at the time when many other Australian artists were exhibiting in London. He painted Woman in Bath as part of a series of works he was doing of bathroom pictures. It has primarily black on one side and an image of his wife Wendy in a bathtub from behind. Another in the series was a more abstracted Woman in the Bath II, which owed a debt to his yellow and red abstract paintings of the early sixties.

In 1964, while in London, Whiteley was fascinated by the murderer John Christie, who had committed murders in the area near where Whiteley was staying at Ladbroke Grove. He painted a series of paintings based on these events, including Head of Christie. Whiteley's intention was to portray the violence of the events, but not to go too far in showing something which people would not want to see. During this time, Whiteley painted works based on the animals at the London Zoo, such as Two Indonesian Giraffes, which he found sometimes difficult because of how much the animals would move. As he said: "To draw animals, one has to work at white heat because they move so much, and partly because it is sometimes painful to feel what one guesses the animal 'feels' from inside." (Whiteley 1979: 1) Whiteley also made images of the beach, such as in his yellowish painting and collage work The Beach II, which he painted on a brief visit to Australia before his return to London and his winning of a fellowship to America.

Whiteley appears as a character in the book Falling Towards England by Clive James under the name Dibbs Buckley. Wendy appears as "Delish."

Whiteley collections

When in 1967 Whiteley won a Harkness Fellowship Scholarship to study and work in New York he met other artists and musicians while he lived at the Hotel Chelsea. His first impression of New York was shown in the painting First Sensation of New York City, which showed streets with fast moving cars, street signs, hot dog vendors, and tall buildings. One way that America influenced him is the scale of his works. He was very much influenced by the peace movement at the time and came to believe that if he painted one huge painting which would advocate peace, then the Americans would withdraw their troops from Vietnam. Still fairly young, Whiteley was idealistic and caught up in the great peace movements of the 1960s, with the protests against America's involvement in the war in Vietnam. The work was called The American Dream, it was an enormous work that used painting and collage and anything else he could find to put on the 18 wooden panels. It took up a great deal of his time and effort, taking up about a year of working on the piece full time. It started with a peaceful dreamlike serene ocean scene on one side, that worked its way to destruction and chaos in a mass of lighting, red colours and explosions on the other side. It was his comment on the direction the world would be headed and his response to a seemingly pointless war which could end in a nuclear holocaust. Many of the ideas from the work may have come from his experiences with alcohol, marijuana and other drugs. He believed that many of his ideas have come from these experiences, and he often used drugs as a way of bringing the ideas from his subconscious. He sometimes took more than his body could handle, and had to be admitted to hospital for alcohol poisoning twice. Around him at the Hotel Chelsea, other artists and musicians took heroin, which Whiteley did not take at that time. The painting which was finally produced was made of many different elements, using collage, photography and even flashing lights, with a total length of nearly 22 meters. However Marlborough-Gerson, his gallery, refused to show this work which he had been working on for about a year, and he was so distraught that he decided to leave New York, and he 'fled' to Fiji.

Whiteley 1970's

Whiteley was awarded the Wynne Prize again in 1984, and the following year purchased an old T-shirt factory in Surry Hills, Sydney and converted it into a studio. Further renovations followed and in later years the downstairs gallery area was repainted and now houses changing exhibitions. In 1991 he was awarded the Order of Australia (General Division). In the last years of his life Whiteley travelled far and wide, taking in England, Bali, Tokyo, and spending two months in Paris in an apartment on Rue de Tournon. On 15 June 1992 he was found dead from a heroin overdose in a motel room in Thirroul on the NSW coast. The coroner's verdict was 'death due to self-administered substances'. He was 53 years old.

In the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1991, Brett Whiteley was appointed an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia. On 15 June 1992, aged 53, he was found dead from a heroin overdose in a motel room in Thirroul, north of Wollongong. The coroner's verdict was 'death due to self-administered substances'.

In 1999, Brett's mother Beryl Whiteley founded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in memory of her son. Also in 1999, Whiteley's painting The Jacaranda Tree (1977), which had won the Wynne Prize, sold for $1,982,000, a record for a modern Australian painter.

In 2007 his painting The Olgas sold for an Australian record of $3.5 million. On 7 May 2007, Opera House, (which took Whiteley a decade to paint, and which he exchanged with Qantas for a period of free air travel) sold for $2.8 million, in Sydney.

Brett Whiteley is one of Australia's most revered artists. His lyrical expressionism and lack of inhibition placed him at the forefront of Australia's avant-garde art movement. He won many prizes and awards and his work hangs in numerous galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

www.abc.net.au  www-portrait-gov-au  

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Galeria Aniela sells top-quality works of art, only of impeccable provenance, contact us  visit the gallery, Email  or  phone +61 2 4465 1494
Brett Whiteley AO (1939–1992), Garden (1975) original Ink on Paper on board, Image Size: 85 cm x 75 cm, Framed Size: 122 cm x 108 cmGarden 1975  original

Brett Whiteley (1939–1992)

 ink on paper

Signed: BW lower right, Artist's stamp upper left and lower right Date inscribed lower right: 21/7/75 Further glimpsing [sic] in 'Garden'

Image Size: 85 x 75 cm

Framed: 122 x 108 cm

PROVENANCE: Sotheby's Sydney 7 May 2007 LOT 73 AU0711

Garden 1975 is characteristically Whiteley, masterwork with great attention to details, distinctive swirling strokes, pleasing to the eye flowing lines and elegant shapes. 'Garden' 1975 was inspired by a stunningly beautiful garden hidden near the water at Lavender Bay.

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Galeria Aniela sells top-quality works of art, only of impeccable provenance, contact us  visit the gallery, Email  or  phone +61 2 4465 1494
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