20|21 Art 
11 June 2024
Rex Ashlock, Myth I - Image 1 of 2
Rex Ashlock, Myth I - Image 2 of 2
20|21 Art 
Rex Ashlock, Myth I - Image 1 of 2
Rex Ashlock, Myth I - Image 2 of 2
158

Rex Ashlock 1918–1999

Myth I

1971
oil on canvas 60 h × 50 w in (152 × 127 cm)
estimate: $3,000–5,000
result: $1,890
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Dated to verso ‘1971'. This work is registered in the Rex Ashlock Trust as number 539P.
provenance: Estate of the artist | Private Collection

This work will ship from Lambertville, New Jersey.

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Rex Ashlock's “Myth I”

Beginning in the late 1960s, Ashlock created a series of paintings focused on a single large island. In Myth I, he places a nude standing on a beach with a large island seemingly hovering in the ocean behind her.  Ashlock’s troublesome divorce and escape to New York suggests he is warning the viewer of the myth of Odysseus. This beautiful woman may be a siren, luring sailors with her beautiful voice, preventing them from ever returning to their wives and children. By the mid-1970s, the canvases in Swimmers Series would suggest individual nude females swimming by the shore, refracted, as they might be seen from above by a seagull.

— Peter Hastings Falk


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