Provenance
Hamilton Galleries, London, 1963, Cat. no. 6
Note: In 1946, while still in Australia, Friedeberger had started working, in a high-pitched palette of bright colours, on a series of paintings of children at play. It was a subject that would occupy him for the next 20 or so years: the blocky, abstracted brush marks and aggressively vivid colours of these canvases proved a perfect medium for the rough and tumble of children’s play.
When they were shown at his first-one man exhibition at Annely Juda’s newly opened Hamilton Gallery in London in 1963, the art critic Charles Spencer wrote: “The world of children – serious, cruel, aggressive, self-centred – is to him not only a reflection of life itself, but, because of its uninhibitedness, a truer insight into human behaviour.”