Australia 1927 – Australia 1982
Minimal landscape no. 1
oil on canvas
146.0 (h) x 197.0 (w) cm
The Murdoch Family Trust
© estate of Fred Williams
In the late 1960s Williams was experimenting with a range of new ways of thinking about the landscape. Minimal landscape no. I relates to his Australian Landscape series and goes beyond reference to a particular regional location to a wider sense of the country as a whole.
The work was painted around the time when various forms of abstraction including Minimalism were of interest to a younger generation of artists. Always open to new ideas, Williams recognised the potential of a minimal response to landscape in the way that the application of very small dots in space could increase a sense of the magnitude and spaciousness of the landscape. He once described his increasingly sparse approach during this time as a process of allowing his pictures ‘to breathe’.