Brett Whiteley’s The Cat is interior life turned electric. All ultramarine heat and sun-struck yellow, it distills the Lavender Bay studio into a charged field where colour, space, and sensation are pushed to full intensity.

This interior scene borrows the language of still life, but only in name. The vase of native flowers, the blue-and-white ceramic vessel, and the sculptural form on its pedestal are all set in motion. Nothing is permitted to sit quietly. The wicker chair seems to rock, harbour light enters as movement rather than view, and the cat sleeps at the centre of it all, unbothered, like a small point of gravity holding the room together.

Whiteley’s gesture is simple and radical: he refuses stillness. The objects are not arranged for contemplation so much as absorbed into a single animated environment. Inside and outside cease to function as separate categories; they become conditions of the same experience. The studio is no longer depicted as a space, but as a continuum of light, objects, and air.

A rare, charged impression of Whiteley at his most fluent, where domestic space becomes not just subject matter, but a kind of living energy. Bold, immersive, and quietly irreverent, The Cat is less about stillness than presence; the pleasure of a room fully switched on. Whiteley’s work is represented across Australian public collections and internationally at the Tate Gallery in London and MoMA in New York. An adjunct of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, his studio has become a permanent public gallery. For collector’s of important Australian art, Whiteley is a prize.

Brett WHITELEY (1939 - 1992)
'Cat' 1980
offset lithograph on paper
Edition of 4
Image Size: 84 x 82 cm
Dimensions: 120 x 93 x 4 cm
Signed: signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: A/P 4 'the cat' brett whiteley bears artist's stamp with initials below image

Comes with Letter of Provenance

Exhibited: probably Brett Whiteley: Drawings and Gouaches, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, April – May 1981, cat. 8 (another example) The Entire Collection of Graphics of Brett Whiteley: 1961–1981, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 20 Ju.Literature: Mandy, R., Brett Whiteley: The Complete Graphics: 1961 – 1982, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1983, cat. 59, p. 42 (illus., another example) Brett Whiteley: The Graphics: 1961-1992, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne

Condition:very good.

(c) Brett Whiteley / Copyright Agency