Oil on canvas, framed. Featuring an abstract expressionist portrait. Signed a. gorky on the upper right corner. Attributed to Arshile Gorky (1904-1948, Armenian-American). 39 x 33 cm (15.25 x 13 inches). Framed size: 41.5 x 35 cm (16.25 x 13.75 inches). PROVENANCE: Southern Ontario estate

Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) was an Armenian-American painter best known for his profound influence on the developments of Abstract Expressionism. Gorky built on the developments of Surrealism with a vocabulary of painterly brushwork and idiosyncratic forms, to produce works such as Garden in Sochi (1941). “The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush,” he once mused. “As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.” Born Vostanik Manoug Adoian on April 15, 1904 in Khorgom, Ottoman Empire, he and his family were victims of the Armenian Genocide. Having survived a death march at the hands of the Turkish military, he saw his mother die from starvation as a teenager. This event scarred the young artist, with the painful memory later leading him to produce The Artist and His Mother (1926–1936). Fleeing first to Russia and then to the United States in 1920, he changed his name and identity, adopting the last of name of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky to avoid discussing his past. He went on to attend the New School of Design in Boston, where he absorbed the influence of Impressionism and Paul Cézanne. Moving to New York in the early 1930s, he found work as a muralist for the WPA, where he met fellow painters Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. By 1940, Gorky had adopted a Surrealist logic and began using his drawings from nature as catalysts for his abstract paintings. Suffering from depression brought on by health problems and the dissolution of his marriage, the artist committed suicide on July 21, 1948 in Sherman, CT. Today, his works are held the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.

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American, 19th century : This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).