Charles Pachter

OC
1942 -
Canadian

Painted Flag
acrylic on canvas
signed and on verso signed and dated 2004
72 x 40 in, 182.9 x 101.6 cm

Preview at: Heffel Toronto – 13 Hazelton Ave

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
Leonard Wise, Charles Pachter: Canada’s Artist, 2017, pages 106-108

Charles Pachter’s most celebrated and recognizable series, "Painted Flag", was started in the summer of 1980. After building an improvised flagpole at his Oro farm, he observed the different configurations produced by the rippling flag in rapid succession. Captivated by the endless variations, Pachter painted the Canadian flag hovering in the air, observed from various angles and distances with an emphasis on light and shadow.

His first exhibition of large flag paintings took place in 1981 in a remarkable space - a former supermarket transformed by the artist into what was probably the first art gallery to settle on Toronto’s Queen Street West strip. Pachter has returned to this subject often since then, and his depictions of it have evolved into an iconic portrait of a national symbol. Literary critic David Staines aptly wrote, “Pachter devotes much of his work to an examination of national identity. Seizing upon commonplace objects in the Canadian landscape, the flag, the hockey player, the moose…he focuses on them with such relentless and varied intensity that he compels us to reconsider these familiar signposts in our collective memory.”

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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