Les Kossatz

Les Kossatz
Australian 1943–2011

Grass I 1970
lithograph; artist's proof 2
Geelong Gallery
Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1973

In the early 1970s Les Kossatz began creating images that depicted the surrounds of St Andrews, the area of regional Victoria where he lived and worked. Whilst experimenting with a range of artistic mediums and techniques at the time, underpinning his practice at large was a deep interest in the tensions between the natural world and human intervention.

Grass I represents one of Kossatz’s early reinterpretations of the Australian landscape tradition, as he turned his focus to the literal foundations of the land. A simultaneous amplification and distortion of a familiar pastoral subject is captured by this approach, which he described in a 1979 interview with fellow artist James Gleeson as a means of evoking ‘the immediate landscape. That is, the one that’s at one’s feet, on a sort of size for size level’.