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75.
Untitled. Mixed media painting.
Acrylic paint with collaged magazine photograph on Fabriano Fine Art paper. 50x35cm. SIGNED and dated “12/1/87” in pencil to lower edge.
Gestural brush strokes in lush thickets of green and ochre paint, with a collaged colour magazine photograph of a monkey in a tree.
Ecology and animals, especially cats, lemurs, bush babies and monkeys, took on increasing significance for Burroughs in his later years. In 1978 he wrote “Fear and the Monkey”, a poem “Sad as the death of monkeys” (collected in “The Burroughs File”, 1984).
The work here is an early painting on paper - Burroughs didn’t paint on paper until after Brion Gysin’s death - executed seven days before the opening of his first solo show at Tony Shafrazi’s gallery in New York.
Fine.