Robert Natkin (American, 1930-2010). Acrylic on canvas painting titled “I Gambled and Won” depicting the artist’s signature abstract style in bold and pastel colors, 1991. Signed along the lower right. Further signed, titled, and dated along the verso.

Provenance: Private Minnesota Collection.

Lot Essay: Robert Natkin spent his early years in Chicago, renovating and operating the Wells Street Gallery with his wife Judy Dolnick, also an artist. In the late 1950s they moved to New York and then in 1970 to Redding, Connecticut, where he would spend the rest of his life. His work has been associated with abstract expressionism, color field painting, as well as Lyrical Abstraction. He was described as mischievous in his obituary in the New York Times, having once purportedly licked a Vermeer painting in the Frick collection. He also once removed a Nicolas Poussin painting from the wall in the Art Institute of Chicago and replaced it with his own, hiding the Poussin behind a velvet curtain, before switching it back when his replacement went unnoticed. His playful nature lent itself to equally playful canvases. The shapes in the present work seemingly bounce off of one another and are interspersed with polka dots and lines that heighten the energy of the painting. His use of cloth and netting as stencils led New York Time journalist John Russell to comment in 1978 as his artworks having a “worked-over look that suggests that the painting has been traversed over and over by a very small truck that has just had its tires retreaded.” This texture can be spotted throughout the present work in the net-like patterns that comprise much of the central field of the painting.

His artworks are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Fogg Art Museum, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among many other prestigious collections.

Unframed; height: 25 3/4 in x width: 65 in.
Framed; height: 26 3/4 in x width: 66 in.