"Lowlands #1" belongs to a pivotal series of thirteen paintings born from Gershon Iskowitz’s historic 1967 trip to Churchill, Manitoba, and his experience of flying over the vast northern landscape.
Rather than depicting the terrain literally, Iskowitz translates the sensation of viewing it from above into an increasingly abstract visual language. The Lowlands paintings are characterized by dominant horizontal bands of colour extending into narrow “stems,” lighter passages, and small clusters of contrasting colour. Iskowitz described the compositions as evoking the “swoop down” of an aircraft approaching the landscape.
In this important early painting, the landscape is reduced to luminous green form set against an earthy, horizontal-leaning ground. The central band and descending stem suggest the estuary of the Churchill River, while the surrounding passages oscillate between land, sky, and negative space. Yet these associations remain deliberately unstable. Iskowitz was less interested in reproducing what he saw than in capturing the expansiveness, unusual light, and shifting spatial relationships of the Canadian North.
The series also marks the emergence of formal devices that would become central to Iskowitz’s oeuvre. Small clusters of vividly coloured “blips” introduce movement and optical tension, their ambiguous placement making it difficult to determine whether they are floating, falling, or embedded within the larger forms.
At a moment when Canadian abstraction was dominated by colour-field, hard-edge, and systemic approaches, Iskowitz’s combination of landscape memory, invented forms, and luminous colour was distinctly personal. "Lowlands #1" captures the artist developing the singular pictorial vocabulary that would define his mature practice.
The Churchill experience became a lasting point of reference for Iskowitz, informing subsequent trips to James Bay and Yellowknife and shaping his work for the remainder of his career. As his paintings grew larger and more complex, natural forms were increasingly reduced to vibrant organic patches of colour, while distinctions between foreground and background dissolved.
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"Lowlands #1"
Canada, 1969
Acrylic on canvas
Signed and dated lower right
19.5"H 13.25"W (work)
21.25"H 14.75"W (framed)
Overall good condition
Note: price is $14,500 CAD
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