Year Of Birth

1933

Year Of Death

2017

Biography

Born in Adelaide in 1933, Sydney Ball worked as an architectural draughtsman before taking up art studies in the late 1950s. His early lessons and influences were challenged when he moved to New York in 1963 and encountered the work of the abstract expressionists. Ball was a pioneer of post-painterly abstraction in Australia. This term, first coined by American critic Clement Greenberg, describes a generation of painters who reacted to mid-century abstract expressionism through hard-edge works, or using washes or poured areas of saturated, intense colour.