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Lot Essay
With the close of the Robert Fraser Gallery in New York Caulfield joined Waddington Galleries, London. His first solo exhibition with his new gallery was at Waddington Prints Gallery, Vigo Street, in December 1968. This was followed by his first solo exhibition at Waddington Galleries II in Cork Street which included the present work, five other oils and five screenprints. A number of pictures showed an increase in scale from previous works including Inside a Swiss Chalet (Waddington Galleries, London) and Inside a Weekend Cabin (Manchester City Art Galleries) which were both 109 x 72 in. (276.9 x 182.9 cm.)
In his essay in the 1999 exhibition catalogue Marco Livingstone discusses Caulfield's work from this period which Livingstone categorises as 'Retreat' pictures; '... he [Caulfield] had come to favour the depiction of familiar objects and invented places that draw the viewer into an illusion of three-dimensional space solely by means of two-dimensional forms and devices ... he dwelt on images that enabled him to contradict in a playful way the severely flat visual language that he had imposed upon himself: the modernist picture plane is visually stretched to the point of being pierced by the imagined holes and openings to which the viewer's gaze is so forcefully directed. The net effect is like a conjuring trick laid bare to the audience: even though there is no secret about how the effect has been obtained, it continues to weave it's magic so long as the spectator wishes to succumb to the illusion ... He felt it necessary to depict them the size that one would expect them to be ... and it is precisely because the motif is shown actual size that one responds to it viscerally as if it were the real thing, that the artist has the freedom to play on one's preconceptions.
The large works are much more extreme in their exclusive reliance on a black linear grid, so that the single underlying colour is charged not only with describing the look but also with creating the atmosphere and the emotional tone of the environment ... it is up to us to bring the place alive, and complete the work with our own response' (see M. Livingstone, Exhibition catalogue, op. cit, pp. 13-15).
In his essay in the 1999 exhibition catalogue Marco Livingstone discusses Caulfield's work from this period which Livingstone categorises as 'Retreat' pictures; '... he [Caulfield] had come to favour the depiction of familiar objects and invented places that draw the viewer into an illusion of three-dimensional space solely by means of two-dimensional forms and devices ... he dwelt on images that enabled him to contradict in a playful way the severely flat visual language that he had imposed upon himself: the modernist picture plane is visually stretched to the point of being pierced by the imagined holes and openings to which the viewer's gaze is so forcefully directed. The net effect is like a conjuring trick laid bare to the audience: even though there is no secret about how the effect has been obtained, it continues to weave it's magic so long as the spectator wishes to succumb to the illusion ... He felt it necessary to depict them the size that one would expect them to be ... and it is precisely because the motif is shown actual size that one responds to it viscerally as if it were the real thing, that the artist has the freedom to play on one's preconceptions.
The large works are much more extreme in their exclusive reliance on a black linear grid, so that the single underlying colour is charged not only with describing the look but also with creating the atmosphere and the emotional tone of the environment ... it is up to us to bring the place alive, and complete the work with our own response' (see M. Livingstone, Exhibition catalogue, op. cit, pp. 13-15).