IMPORTANT WORKS

GRETCHEN ALBRECHT

Illumination (3) (1978)

acrylic on canvas frame: 1864 x 843 x 48 mm signed, dated bottom right

Directly informed by a major commission undertaken in 1978 for an operatic adaption of Tristan and Iseult written by composer Gillian Whitehead, Albrecht painted seven hanging canvas banners of “freeform imagery with an emphasis on long, plunging verticals.” 1 The extended Illuminations series which followed - “more challenging and expansive than anything she had previously done” 2 - heralded the arrival of what she recognised as her mature and truly distinctive work.

Soft and settled yet exuberant and lustrous, Illumination (3) (1978) exemplifies Albrecht’s singular visual dexterity and fluency: the cojoined ability of shape and colour to transmit vital and uplifting sensations as well as the tendency of her imagery to alternate between abstraction and oblique resemblance. Both literal and metaphoric, complex and expansive as well as expressionistic, Illumination (3) is a tumbling avalanche of colour containing diffuse allusions which become psychic landscapes where thoughts, feelings and sensations are making journeys and traversals of their own. 3

Aptly titled and key to perception Illumination (3) glows from within, as if light is emerging from inside and behind. It is an outstanding example of Albrecht’s “regarding ‘Nature’ as a cosmological resource of illumination where light acts as a colour and where colour articulates symbolic meanings and that there is an instantaneous connection forged between a spiritual emanation and a physical incarnation.” 4

“Albrecht paints a mythos whose purpose is to speak with colour, to touch with shape, to hear with time and to savour with rotation. Her imagination looks at colour and imagines it as incarnate seeing. Her illuminations consist of self-revelations born from colour’s motile conjunction.” 5

1 Luke Smythe, Gretchen Albrecht: Between Gesture and Geometry, Massey University Press, 2019, p. 100.

2 Ibid, p. 100.

3 Ibid, p. 66.

4 Ron Brownson, Gretchen Albrecht: Illuminations, Auckland Art Gallery / Random House, 2002, p. 9-15.

5 Ibid, p. 21.

PRICELIST

CHRIS BAILEY

Te Ngau o Te Rangi (2021)

cast bronze, patina, wax

artist proof 2/2 + edition of 5

size: 1180 x 630 x 280 mm

signed, dated, titled, numbered verso

By day this deep-relief sculpted work represents Tāwhirimātea, the Māori male god of weather and the personification of the weather in traditional Māori narratives, and by night the female god of weather, and Tāwhiri’s wife, Hine-mai-oho-rangi. 1

Acknowledged as a master carver and represented in numerous significant collections, Chris Bailey has undertaken many major commissions including most recently the entrance works at the Wairua Art Gallery, Whangārei and the seven pou in Britomart.

1 Chris Bailey, Artist statement, 2022.

CHRIS BAILEY

Te Iti ō Hauraki (2021)

5 pieces; totara, shou sugi ban finish overall size on wall: 1545 x 1940 x 202 mm each piece variously signed, dated and/or inscribed “Ruawehea” verso

Te Iti ō Hauraki (2021) speaks to Chris Bailey’s relationship to the whenua and his tupuna, and his female ancestor Ruawehea, whose ancestral claim to Hauraki allowed the descendants of Marutūāhu to enter the area once she married Tamaterā. 1

The work depicts Ruawehea flanked by her offspring. 2 The wood gleams with life. The shou sugi ban finish (hand-polished, flame-charred timber) lends a rich lustre to the totara, enhancing the sensuous fleshiness and feeling that the soft indentations could have been pressed into it by the maker’s hand.

Haere mai, nau mai

Haere mai, kuhu noa mai ki ngā hūhā o Ruawehea

Come forth, welcome

Come forth and enter the thighs of Ruawehea 3

1 Chris Bailey, Artist statement, 2022.

2 Ibid.

3 Ngāti Hako traditional call of welcome.

GRAHAM BENNETT

Be It on Our Heads (2017)

photogrammetry, printed stone composite figures, steel, acrylic sheet, bamboo, copper, brass size: 1530 x 1000 x 1000 mm

Graham Bennett draws the central motif in this incisive work from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. That fourteenth century work is a revelatory vision of a world fashioned by humankind to suit its own purpose.

Bennett uses images of our endangered matuku hūrepo, bittern, whose wetlands are increasingly polluted or have disappeared entirely. Be It on Our Heads (2017), a major work from one of our leading sculptors, is about ecological failure and our complicit behaviours.

ISRAEL TANGAROA BIRCH

Whatumanawa (Red) (2016)

lacquer on etched stainless steel

panel: 1800 x 803 x 51 mm

signed, dated “7.16”, titled verso

Alive with light and luminous colour, transitioning between states of being, where lozenges of colour oscillate and spatial depth alters with your view point, Whatumanawa (Red) (2016) astounds. We see organic patterns, swirling marks and repeated diamond-shapes occupying different depths and escaping the twodimensional confines of the carved and lacquered surface.

This astonishing holographic effect and the contrast of regular geometry and fluxing pattern establishes an ineffable energy, where visual planes are forever changing, as spiritual and symbolic nuance emerges and flows.

CHRIS BOOTH

Hawks Crag (2015)

South Island granite, stainless steel installation: 3070 x 1000 x 200 mm (variable)

Chris Booth is a major figure in New Zealand sculpture with “his own, highly recognisable sculptural language.” 1

Employing a “Japanese reverence for nature… the result looks effortless and perfectly authentic.” 2

Booth’s works are “responses to specific geographical location” and demonstrate acute understandings of geological history, close observation of nature and represent “the idea of making landscape into sculpture.” 3

1 Edward Lucie-Smith, Foreword, Woven Stone: The Sculpture of Chris Booth, Godwit, 2007, p. 8.

2 Ken Scarlett, Ibid p. 289.

3 Edward Lucie-Smith, Ibid p. 8-9. PRICELIST

JOANNA BRAITHWAITE

Waiting Game (2017) oil on canvas

stretcher: 1113 x 1120 x 31 mm

signed, dated, titled verso

With pathos balanced by absurdity, Braithwaite questions the nature of existence and the ecological perils of our time. By imbuing a polar bear with human characteristics, hierarchies are completely inverted and a psychological narrative emerges questioning the very nature of existence.

The imbalances she presents between man and all animals “wrenches the works away from simple realism towards the surreal,” 1 and into a substantial environmental discourse where we see a polar bear family, literally and metaphorically, standing on a precipice not of their making. Replete with trademark humour, they are mute performers trapped in imperilled existence.

1 Peter Simpson, “Pleasure Seeking and Surrealism,” Sunday Star Times, 19 August 2001.

MIKE CRAWFORD

Kāhu (2023)

cast glass

size: 565 x 162 x 143 mm

signed, dated verso

Mike Crawford is a pre-eminent New Zealand glass artist as Kāhu (2023) clearly demonstrates. Delivered with a rich density of colour, wrapped in the sculptural language of sinuous form abstracted into flowing mass, he uses the soft materiality and tonal hues of glass with telling restraint. He establishes and conveys the stature of the swamp harrier hawk and its cloak-like wings wrapping its body, as he brings our eyes up – in a flow – directly to the visual tension of the raptor’s beak and chest in a tour de force emphasis of its very essence.

NEIL DAWSON

Reflections - Clouds (2017) powdercoated, painted steel size: 1035 x 1005 x 134 mm

Playing with illusion, allusion, perception and the mutating vagaries of light, in Reflections - Clouds (2017) Neil Dawson uses architecture as an ecological parable of our time. He contrasts the natural world with the man-made, developing an incisive narrative about global warming where the horizon line is that of the rising water level: the silent signifier of global warming.

Clouds are depicted floating past the outlined colonnaded Victorian architecture of a historic Dunedin building. All is then flipped 180 degrees as this is reflected in the rising water. This juxtaposition of image and pattern builds the environmental narrative further. Behind this, the fluxing shadows add a markedly ethereal presence to the planet-like domed, tipped-forward sculpture.

Simultaneously advancing and receding, hovering as if modelled in space itself, Reflections - Clouds is a commanding, poignant, deceptively simple lament about where we appear to be going.

PAUL DIBBLE

Stories of a Lost Land (2022)

cast bronze, 24 karat gold gilding artist proof 1/1 + edition of 5 sculpture: 1940 x 1295 x 1170 mm signed, dated on base

By uniting two iconic symbols – the kōwhai flower and a pair of huia birds – Paul Dibble is “representing an essence of nationalism” 1 while powerfully reminding us how transient and interdependent values can be. Delivering compelling notions of purity and beauty, a major narrative about absence and loss develops.

The tribute to the last huia birds is counter-pointed by another pair of gold-leafed kōwhai flowers, in one sense “hanging like mourning bouquets for the silent presence of the lost huia” 2 and in another they are forever united across time as monuments to who we are and what we have lost getting there.

1 Fran Dibble, Paul Dibble: A Decade of Sculpture 2010-2020, David Bateman, 2020, p. 127. 2 Ibid, p. 130.

PAUL DIBBLE

A Moment (2023)

cast bronze

edition 1/5 + 1 artist proof

size: 2105 x 385 x 310 mm signed, dated on base

Waiting for Time to Pass (2023)

cast bronze

edition 1/5 + 1 artist proof

size: 2125 x 345 x 320 mm

signed, dated on base

This year Paul Dibble has made two new large geometric figures, part of a consistent genre in the sculptor’s oeuvre, spanning a twenty five-year period.

The figures come on the heels of the COVID years and it isn’t hard to see in their stance some of the feelings that these times have produced, a sort of selfcontainment in a world that has seemed frozen and foreign, the figures isolated and alone.

The characteristic reduction of the human form in the geometric studies, has the arms and limbs redefined as simple geometric shapes – the legs turning into cones, the heads abbreviated to spheres – unexpectedly this gives them a nuanced and intense sense of gesture. And we see this here. In A Moment (2023), she looks dreamy, as if her mind is far away while Waiting for Time to Pass (2023) has a distinctly pensive atmosphere, the crossed arms here suggesting stiffened shoulders as if there is some endurance required in this business of standing.

We don’t know what they wait for or of what they dream, but these are not narrations of stories, rather they express raw emotions - simply.

- Fran Dibble, June 2023

Pictured from left to right: Waiting for Time to Pass (2023) / A Moment (2023) PRICELIST

Paul Dibble

A Moment (2023)

Paul Dibble

Waiting for Time to Pass (2023)

PAUL DIBBLE

A Moment (Model) (2023)

cast bronze

artist proof 1/1 + edition of 10

size: 690 x 195 x 195 mm

signed on base

Waiting for Time to Pass (Model) (2023)

cast bronze

artist proof 1/1 + edition of 10

size: 680 x 197 x 200 mm

signed on base

A fundamental aspect of Paul Dibble’s making process is the role performed by his ‘models’. This enables him to examine and develop the forms, character disposition and narrative nuances of the work before upscaling them into the larger works.

GRAHAM FLETCHER

Spirit Rooms II (Head, Rack and Stool) (2023) oil on canvas

stretcher: 1526 x 1526 x 32 mm

signed, dated “May 2023”, titled verso

Even-handed and generous, delivered with a noticeably soft brush, the viewer’s lineof-sight (and entrance into the narratives) begins well forward of the painting itself. In Spirit Rooms II (Head, Rack and Stool) (2023) Graham Fletcher presents architecture as a motif of time, place and constructed taste in which objects of veneration collectively convey the beliefs and values of the absent inhabitants.

We see the ‘spirit world’ is to be found where and how we live, in what we collect and value.

NEIL FRAZER

Divider (2007)

oil over acrylic on canvas

stretcher: 1522 x 1522 x 34 mm

signed, dated, titled verso

The contemplative calm and epic nature of Divider (2007), its three-dimensionality standing out against a white cipher of sky and the mirrored reflection of it all in the lake below, including the ice-face rising in the foreground, immerse the viewer in the threatening, daunting immensity and singular beauty of the southern alpine environment.

Neil Frazer’s unique application of paint – gestural in nature and abstracted in delivery – explores tensions between the real and imaginary, his subtle variations of shade deliver the mountainous volumes, scale and physicality so acutely that the sense of actually being there and in it is profoundly experienced.

DICK FRIZZELL

Pascoid Tiki #10 (2013) oil on linen

frame: 1123 x 998 x 43 mm

signed, dated “7/3/2013”, titled bottom right

Frizzell directly acknowledges his legendary Tiki Series and its 1990 exhibition which are widely regarded as amongst the most significant events in New Zealand art. In that exhibition and those that followed, Frizzell subjected the tiki form to stylistic transformation and the varied history of abstract art. Astonishing works resulted; endless arguments around dining tables in Auckland began…

The compelling Pascoid Tiki #10 (2013) explicitly references Picasso, subjecting the ‘classic’ Tiki form to the reconstruction of Picasso’s North African sourced abstraction of the human face. While still remaining unmistakably a Tiki, Frizzell’s stylistic reinterpretation links it to a modernist construct. The resultant cultural and symbolic transportation was at the time viewed by some as an aberration - a sacred cow travesty - even when the visual evidence clearly demonstrated that the integrity of the Tiki form had been fully retained. This serves to remind us that fundamental identity cannot ever be lost, if it is being respected.

DICK FRIZZELL

Otama Flat Road - West of Gore (2019) oil on linen

stretcher: 752 x 1048 x 36 mm

signed, dated “8/8/2019”, titled bottom right

Completed when Artist in Residence at Henderson House in Alexandra, Otama Flat Road – West of Gore (2019) elevates the ordinary to noteworthy, reminding us yet again of Frizzell’s remarkable ability to see patterns and rhythms where others only see the ordinary and mundane.

Animated by light and rolling form, further enhanced by the hide and reveal of his distinctive rural vernacular, partial repetition draws the viewer’s eye along and in again and again. Frizzell celebrates the location while wondrous sensations of a journey also emerge.

DARRYN GEORGE

Garden of Eden (6-9-20) (2020)

oil pastel, acrylic on canvas

stretcher: 1870 x 1420 x 55 mm

signed, dated bottom left; signed, dated, titled verso

With the Christian narrative explicitly referenced, Darryn George develops a parable of hope and belief; a collective yearning for a time free from social and environmental ills such as the mosque massacre in his hometown, Christchurch.

A waterlily watercourse runs through the middle of the painting, as do the Avon and Heathcote Rivers of Christchurch. Lines of colour suggesting a rainbow rise like a column upward. Lozenges of side-by-side colour in decreasing scale depict the heads of a seated audience watching events unfold on the ‘stage of life’ before them.

This is a visual cornucopia, with a rigorous pictorial structure built of thirds, filled with verdant gardens, whimsy, celebratory joy and beauty.

PAT HANLY

Inside the Garden (1960/2020)

stained, painted glass, made in collaboration with Ben Hanly and Suzanne Johnson frame: 845 x 840 x 25 mm

Pat Hanly worked with stained glass throughout his career, in direct association with son Ben Hanly and Suzanne Johnson of Glassworks. He undertook major commissions all over New Zealand and produced a considerable body of work in that medium. All the acclaimed elements of Hanly’s painting – clear flat planes of colour, blasts of light, sensations of summer and celebratory tone – made his use of glass fundamental in his oeuvre.

Significant amongst many of Hanly’s achievements as an expressionistic artist was his use of the garden as a metaphor of identity and location, hope and evolution. His was a Pacific-focused world view, and the garden linked it all culturally, geographically and botanically. The garden was to Hanly an emphatic celebration of Auckland as the largest Polynesian city in the world.

CHRIS HEAPHY

Truth is Nothing Yet (2023)

acrylic on Belgian linen

stretcher: 1250 x 1800 x 40 mm

signed, dated, titled verso

Facing towards the light, silhouetted by an animated, abstracted background comprised of gestural washes, dramatically playing with scale and shifting context, Chris Heaphy builds a conversation - in part - about identity, the collision of culture and the nature of truth with the adorned head of a Māori chief visually dominant.

While narratively expansive in nature, the transcript is elusive, time conflated. Multitudes are revealed where the artist introduces – like rock drawings – other presences, some explicitly referencing previous suites of his work.

Birds, feathers, animals, motifs add to the visual vocabulary in such a way that the work seems to shape-shift in an unfixed manner which is both surprising and consequential, for a zen-like equilibrium arises in a pictorial environment comprised of moments, cultural facts and symbolic signifiers.

CHRIS HEAPHY

Kupu Arataki (2020)

acrylic on linen

stretcher: 755 x 751 x 37 mm

signed, dated, titled bottom right; signed, dated, titled verso

Replete with three foundation colours (red, black, white) dominating, Kupu Arataki (2020) recalls early European portraits of Māori. Alive with colour and movement, patterns and motifs are inscribed onto the silhouetted head and whakapapa is literally present (in the branchlet form of a family tree). Arataki (to guide) informs our looking. Kupu (anything said, a message, word, talk, speak) adds additional conversations about time and identity.

MICHAEL HIGHT

Rakiura (2021)

oil on linen

stretcher: 1526 x 1220 x 32 mm

titled bottom left, signed, dated bottom right; signed, dated, titled verso

Michael Hight’s acclaimed Nocturne paintings use the format of a bookcase as a visual device to upend the conventions of scale, subject matter and how a tale is told. Comprised of artefact objects functioning as memory cues he builds a perplexing tableau, literary in character, where visual tensions are established and a conversation emerges about values, behaviour and time’s inexorable passing.

Rakiura (Stewart Island) (2021) contains two landscape vignettes: Gog and Magog (the spectacular and strange granite domes behind Port Pegasus near the southern end of the island, and named after the demons from the Old Testament) run across the top, while the other sits alone like a specimen ready for examination on a plate. There’s a whale pot, sourced from Leask Bay, the actual manual telephone exchange used on the island, previously housed at the former Post Office and now in the collection of the Rakiura Museum. A ti-tree is shown shaped by wind. Comprised of such specifics and more, presented as individual picture-scapes, considerable historic and social links emerge which at first seem contradictory but quickly coalesce into a greater narrative whole.

MICHAEL HIGHT

Gates of Haast (2021)

oil on linen

stretcher: 1170 x 1837 x 33 mm

signed, dated, titled bottom left; signed, dated, titled verso

Gates of Haast (2021) is a remarkable tour de force.

Acknowledging Petrus van der Velden’s sublime, stormy and brooding painting, Otira Gorge (1912), Michael Hight (similarly) places the viewer amongst a West Coast river’s course and the fractured stones lining its unstable, spilling path.

Majestic, threatening and imperilled, Hight delivers the huge complexity of the location and its environment with commanding accuracy. We see its eroded banks; the precariousness of the forest tumbling down and witness the weather change coming down the valley.

RALPH HOTERE

Winter Solstice (1988)

stained glass in wooden window frame

frame: 1175 x 985 x 42 mm

signed, dated bottom left

Winter Solstice (1988) hung in Ralph Hotere’s Observation Point studio until the headland and the studio were compulsorily acquired by the Port of Otago. Catching the light in the Aramoana-facing window, it was part of his daily life. Glass was a key medium for Hotere – he worked in it throughout his career. This is one of the largest of his stained glass works.

Explicitly referencing the scuttling of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior at Matauri Bay (12 December 1987) following its earlier sinking in Auckland Harbour in 1985 by the French, it is also the crucifixion of Christ. Hotere uses German float glass for the body (which has surface qualities and colour variations akin to kauri gum), depicting an abstracted figure with two bleeds (rainbow-shaped) falling from where the spear wounds would be. The shape of the body and shoulders collectively form a tau cross furthering the Christian (Catholic) iconography so fundamental to Hotere’s visual language.

YUKI KIHARA

Whakatu Freezing Works, Heretaunga (2017)

lenticular photograph

edition 5/5 + 2 artist proofs

frame: 1090 x 1525 x 45 mm

signed certificate

Yuki Kihara’s use of the lenticular process – where the photographic image is seen to move and alter – has become one of her signature characteristics. Invented about the same time as photography itself and a precursor to what we recognise as film and video today, the stop-go process of it elicits considerable awareness of the viewing process and the act of perception in every viewer.

Whakatu Freezing Works, Heretaunga (2017) was part of Te Taenga Mai o Salome, a suite of lenticular photographs commissioned by MTG Hawkes Bay in 2017, openly acknowledging the considerable links between Ngāti Kahungunu and Sāmoa when the ancestral canoe Tākitimu journeying from Hawaiki stopped at Sāmoa before landing at what is now known as Tākitimu Beach.

The link between Sāmoa and the Hawkes Bay grew further again with considerable numbers of Sāmoans working in the factories there from the 1960s onwards. Salome, Kihara’s time-travelling alter-ego, dressed in a Victorian mourning dress, pays homage to them amongst the brutalist architecture of what is now an abandoned site.

SANDRO KOPP

Mermaid Mnemonics (2023) oil on canvas stretcher: 1008 x 763 x 31 mm

signed, dated, titled verso

Completed on Waiheke Island in early 2023, Mermaid Mnenomics has developed out of Kopp’s extended, acclaimed, suite of Bodyweb drawings and has been directly informed by and drawn “inspiration from macrocosmic and microcosmic photography and submarine life… discovering common rhythms… with the human body and movement.” 1

Kopp explores and develops the sensuality of organic lines and partial morphing forms while portraying mankind “as part of the natural world, inseparably woven into the fabric of our environment.” 2 Fluid, dextrous, tonally soft, Kopp delivers mythic moments of primal memory and interconnectedness across time.

Sandro Kopp is a German / New Zealand artist who lives in Scotland. He has exhibited in New York, Milan, Paris, London, Germany, Edinburgh amongst others. His works were prominently featured in Wes Anderson’s 2021 film The French Dispatch and applauded as the “true star” 3 of that acclaimed film. His work is represented in important corporate collections such as Tendercapital Ltd (UK) and very significant private collections.

2 Ibid.

1 Sandro Kopp, email correspondence with Stephen Higginson, 27 July 2023.

3 Miss Rosen, “The Making of the French Dispatch, As Seen by Artist Sandro Kopp,” Anothermag.com, 26 October 2021.

ANDY LELEISI’UAO

Utilitas People of Lemeads (2016) diptych; acrylic on canvas

overall size: 1520 x 1522 x 37 mm

signed bottom right corner of bottom panel

Part pictogram, part hieroglyph, Andy Leleisi’uao develops visual riddles like crossword grids. He presents a multi-layered world where we witness participants in a wellorganised social structure undertaking tasks which might be daily work or something else, more ritualistic in nature. A multitude of meanings, activities and narrative pathways emerge that come to raise more questions than actual answers.

It is Leleisi’uao’s mastery of suggestion, implication and symbolic nuance – the semiotic logic of it all – that reaches out to directly engage the viewer in an explorative journey where no finite answer is supplied or comes close to being sufficient; where the question – what is going on? – comes to be asked again and again. This process – where the viewer is utterly intrinsic to the emergent narrative pathways of events being lived and undertaken – is beguilingly elusive with every interaction with the work being different.

EUAN MACLEOD

Digging / Painting / Rain (2009) oil on canvas

stretcher: 840 x 1197 x 31 mm

signed, dated, titled verso

Openly acknowledged as one of the foremost painters currently working in Australia and New Zealand, Euan Macleod is represented in numerous public collections of importance in both countries and is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes such as the Archibald, Sulman, Blake and Gallipoli.

Energetically applied, Digging / Painting / Rain (2009) is strikingly biographical in one sense for “the figure represents the painter” but in another it is us, “his audience.” This symbolic duality where Macleod “consistently uses the physical world as a mirror for his personal preoccupations” 1 conceals and reveals. Metaphoric and symbolic, we see the lone figure / the artist digging up the very landscape he stands upon and is rendering.

Representing “the artist’s relationship to place” 2 with something of a ghost-like presence developed by the white, light rain falling straight down partially hiding a darker absorbent background, narratives emerge about identity and how - ultimatelythe landscape in turn comes to shape and define its occupants.

1 John McDonald, Foreword in Gregory O’Brien, Euan Macleod: The Painter in the Painting, Piper Press, 2000, p. 8.

2 Gregory O’Brien, Ibid p. 11.

KARL MAUGHAN

Mangarimu (2005/23)

oil on canvas

stretcher: 1523 x 1522 x 35 mm

signed, dated “Oct 2005”, titled verso

Ever faithful to his garden subject, Karl Maughan has developed a unique pictorial language. Part-fiction, part-fact, intricately delivered, idyllic yet unsettling, he suggests and implies and leads the viewer on into spaces which are simultaneously enclosed and open.

Mangarimu (2005/23) is an outstanding example of what sets him apart – it is a work animated by light and a bright palette. It is a celebratory journey without an overarching narrative but intuitions invite us deeper in and a considerable experience begins: we sense what is behind, know it continues left and right, deduce the time of day, and smell the season.

This is a world of continuums, slightly disrupted by what is hidden and denied, unsaid and unpainted. It is ‘a doorway into sensory perception, and… vistas of the subconscious as well as conscious mind.” 1

1 Gregory O’Brien, Florescence: Notes from the Studio in Karl Maughan, Auckland University Press / Gow Langsford Gallery, 2020, p. 157.

MARK MITCHELL

School Road Track (2021)

ceramic, terra sigillata, oxides, gold leaf size: 292 x 392 x 361 mm

One of our most important and innovative of ceramists, awarded the Portage Ceramic Premier Award 2019, Mark Mitchell’s works reveal the distinctive hand and presence of the maker as much as they evidence a practise directly informed by the dialogues and concerns of a broader artistic practice than the norm for the medium.

He uses colour, pattern and line in a very assured manner, exploring the optics of colour, engaging visual rhythms, and the geometry of patterns. In School Road Track (2021) a conversation emerges about the sea and the land, with the landscape presence repeated again in its jagged top. He intervenes with deliberate imprecision and contradiction - hand-drawn scrawl on repeated bands of colour adds the mutability of weather and a sense of flux.

LISA REIHANA

Adorning Rangi (2021)

crystal flex on aluminium

edition 2/9 + 2 artist proofs

frame: 1030 x 760 x 40 mm

signed certificate

“One of the most influential artists of the decade,” 1 Lisa Reihana’s Adorning Rangi (2021) drawn from Ihi, her reimagining of the creation story of Papatūānuku and Ranganui, was commissioned for Auckland’s Aotea Centre.

The story begins with the separation of the sky (male) and the earth (female). “The sun, moon and stars were said… to be the offspring of Rangi and Papa, and to have been placed in the firmament by Tāne so that they might adorn their father.” 2

1 Michael Brand, Director, Art Gallery of NSW in “Who Was the Most Influential Artist of the Decade?” Artnet News, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/most-influential-artist-of-the-decade-1728387, 23 December 2019.

2 Margaret Orbell, The Natural World of the Maori, David Bateman, 1985, p. 39.

IAN SCOTT

Lattice No.16 (1977)

acrylic, crayon on canvas

frame: 1253 x 1253 x 55 mm

signed, dated “March 77”, titled verso

“The Lattices introduced a unique form of geometric abstraction to New Zealand art and established Scott’s reputation… the 1970’s… Lattices demonstrated the singlemindedness and individuality of an artist unafraid to challenge art convention…” 1

“Space is as important as what happens on the surface. When he started developing the Lattices in 1975, Scott was trying to create a space of his own… a system that was unequivocally his, like an insignia, and could not be mistaken for anything else, or anybody else’s system. The experience it generated for the viewer had to be different.” 2

The degree of unity and resolution offered by the cross-motif of the Lattices’ grid-like diagonal, criss-crossing bands, edges defined by lightly rubbed crayon with the bright evocative colours creating spatial shifts including allusions to the prisms of light with the resultant interweaving of them and interlacing of the picture surface heralded Scott’s remarkable, unique, spatial ambiguity. Lattice No. 16 (1977) is an outstanding work, animated by its structure and fluxing visual rhythms.

1 Natalie Poland, Foreword in Edward Hanfling, Ian Scott: Lattices, Ferner Galleries, August 2005 p. 9.

2 Edward Hanfling, Ibid p. 11.

IAN SCOTT

Small Lattice No. 427 (2012)

acrylic on canvas

frame: 935 x 932 x 55 mm

signed, dated “ June 2012”, titled verso

Ian Scott’s extended Lattice Series is one of the most significant suites of work in New Zealand art. In 1974 Scott said “there is a necessity in this country for the development of a free, new, abstract painting, independent of past European styles and ideas, and unhindered by recent American formal concerns.” 1

Small Lattice No. 427 (2012) is a wonderful example of the aesthetic principles of the series where Scott builds interlocking patterns using abstract shapes and colours to push, pull, twist and control the tension while suggesting a myriad of dynamics and feelings.

1 Edward Hanfling, Ian Scott: Lattices, Ferner Galleries, August 2005, p. 23-24.

MICHAEL SHEPHERD

Maungataketake Mountain, Ihumātao (1985) oil on linen

frame: 567 x 695 x 58 mm dated top right

Meticulously observed, with a dense paint surface of sap green and umber, Michael Shepherd’s plein air painting of Maungataketake Mountain, Ihumātao (1985) is a work of profound importance. Recording the quarrying process of the maunga / mountain’s destruction and delivered with a sense of veracity and naturalism, Shepherd recognises that history is embedded in the ground. He builds a timeless metaphor of New Zealand life: what we should value and what we did not.

Ihumātao, the site of the Ōtuataua stonefields, large pa, wāhi tapu and the oldest Māori settlement in Auckland, was confiscated by the New Zealand Government in 1863 as punishment for support of the Kīngitanga movement. It remains a much contested site as well as one of considerable historic, cultural and anthropological significance.

TERRY STRINGER

Egyptian Child (2022)

cast bronze

unique size: 2305 x 600 x 600 mm signed, dated on foot

One of New Zealand’s leading sculptors, Terry Stringer has developed a unique dialect comprised of morphing forms and partial presences, where the boundary between real and suggested actively harnesses the viewer’s perception.

In Egyptian Child (2022), “it is as though one sculpture has been chiselled into so as to reveal another. Out of the standing figure of a child, a face and a gesturing hand are uncovered.” 1

1 Terry Stringer, email correspondence, 5 August 2023.

GRAHAME SYDNEY

Westerly at Dusk (2023) oil on linen stretcher: 760 x 1218 x 33 mm signed, dated bottom right signed, dated, titled, inscribed “Cambrian Valley Studio, Central Otago N.Z.” verso

Grahame Sydney’s theme of isolation, elemental landforms and precise style have become synonymous with the landscapes of Central Otago. “Rendered in near-photographic clarity” where accuracy and emptiness are “the prized quality,” accompanied by the narratives of light and effects of time and sensations of imminence, Sydney’s apparently empty and endless landscapes and spacious skyscapes deliver the “irreducible essence” and “muscularity of the Central Otago plateau.” 1

In Westerly at Dusk (2023) the twisting, brooding, visual mass of the cloud dominates, with the landscape becoming progressively claimed by the creeping arrival of night. Vast distance and the immensity of space emerge as metaphors about mankind’s ultimate insignificance. Sydney - with considerable painterly authority - posits the viewer into the momentary and makes that experience eternal.

1 Andrew Paul Wood, “Book of the Week: Searching for Grahame Sydney,” Reading Room, https://www. newsroom.co.nz/readingroom/book-of-the-week-the-bland-and-the-beautiful-visions-of-grahame-sydney, 25 January 2021.

GORDON WALTERS

Tamaki (1983)

screenprint on paper

edition 49/50

frame: 877 x 673 x 46 mm

sheet: 566 x 760 mm

signed, dated, titled, numbered below printed image

One of New Zealand’s “most distinctive and significant artists… Walters’ mode of abstraction involved a synthesis of international tendencies with local forms and ideas, and was borne of his Pacific locale… His work occupies a central position within the art history of New Zealand… The evolution of Walters’ geometric language… his disciplined interrogation of abstract forms” resulted in work “of remarkable formal exactitude and refinement.” 1

His was a unique practise “that was globally connected yet fundamentally located in the artist’s response to his own environment and culture… inspired by his study of Māori art.” 2

Walters “explored the tension between interconnected forms, using geometric arrangements… drawn from European and American abstraction, kōwhaiwhai, Pacific tattoo patterns, the carved rauponga design and… his study of Māori rock art in Te Waipounamu / South Island.” 3

Tamaki (1983), an outstanding screenprint, is a powerful example of this and what sets him apart.

1 Rhana Davenport and Cam McCracken, Directors’ Foreword in Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons, Julia Waite, Gordon Walters: New Vision, Dunedin Public Art Gallery / Auckland Art Gallery, 2017, p. 6.

2 Lucy Hammonds, Laurence Simmons, Julia Waite, Ibid p. 9.

3 Ibid, p. 9.

TOSS WOOLLASTON

Brownacre (1992) oil on board

frame: 1000 x 1260 x 35 mm signed bottom left

Optimistic and celebratory, filled with light, delivered with an elevated lookout point and horizon line, “Toss Woollaston’s great modernist landscapes” with their considerable painterly gesture, fluency of brushstroke and noticeably warm palette changed “the way New Zealanders saw art, their country and themselves.” 1

His palette “with its earth colours applied with more turps and less oil than usual, giving… his characteristic flat finish” 2 was how Woollaston ‘harvested’ and expressed “the rich emotions that have come to me from the landscape.” 3 The “colours I see as assimilating it to the imagination… coalesce invisibly in my sensations… “ 4 Woollaston believed artists should concentrate on the spiritual dimension.

Woollaston – like McCahon – is acknowledged as a defining figure of New Zealand art and a pioneer of modernism. Brownacre (1992) is a major work: it is an outstandingly tangible and sensuous painting, evidencing liberated rhythms as well as being a painted floating world.

Brownacre (official name Mt Campbell, 1330 m high) is located at the northern end of the Mt Arthur Range, Tasman. “It is a prominent element in the mountain backdrop to Motueka and Riwaka. When Toss came to Riwaka to pick apples as an 18year old in 1928 it was colloquially known as Brownacre, from the prominent patch of brownish tussock visible above the bushline. He always used this name, and when he returned to Riwaka to live in the late 1960s it became one of his favourite landscape subjects.” 5

1 Jill Trevelyan (ed), Toss Woollaston: A Life in Letters, Te Papa Press, 2004.

2 John Summers, quoted in Francis Pound, The Invention of New Zealand: Art and National Identity, 1930-1970, Auckland University Press, 2009 p. 120.

3 Toss Woollaston, The Far Away Hills: A Meditation on New Zealand Landscape, November 1960, Auckland Art Gallery Associates, 1962, p. 4.

4 Ibid p. 44.

5 Philip Woollaston, email correspondence with Stephen Higginson, 10 July 2023.

TOSS WOLLASTON

John Foster (1972) oil on board

frame: 930 x 694 x 28 mm

signed bottom right; titled verso

Woollaston “never lost sight of the tradition he was working in” 1 as his warmtoned brushstroke, outstanding, empathetic portrait of John Foster (1972) clearly demonstrates. Containing “profound observations both of objective truth and subjective love,” 2 it represents the culmination of insight, style and technique encompassing all his painterly concerns.

Meditative, infused with a psychological insight and a profound sense of character and ‘being,’ we ‘see’ and ‘feel’ both John Foster’s personality and mind as well as Woollaston’s profound understanding of the human condition.

1 Oliver Stead, Woollaston, Wallace Arts Trust, 2015, p. 52. 2 Ibid.

PRICELIST

CHRIS BAILEY

CHRIS BAILEY

GRAHAM BENNETT

ISRAEL BIRCH

Illumination (3) (1978)

Te Ngau o Te Rangi (2021)

Te Iti ō Hauraki (2021)

Be It on Our Heads (2017)

Whatumanawa (Red) (2016)

Hawks Crag (2015)

click on artist name to view page

JOANNA BRAITHWAITE

MIKE CRAWFORD

NEIL DAWSON

PAUL DIBBLE

PAUL DIBBLE

PAUL DIBBLE

PAUL DIBBLE

PAUL DIBBLE

GRAHAM FLETCHER

NEIL FRAZER

Waiting Game (2017)

Kāhu (2023)

Reflections - Clouds (2017)

Stories of a Lost Land (2022)

A Moment (2023)

Waiting for Time to Pass (2023)

A Moment (Model) (2023)

Waiting for Time to Pass (Model) (2023)

Spirit Rooms II (Head, Rack and Stool) (2023)

Divider (2007)

Pascoid Tiki #10 (2013)

DICK FRIZZELL

DICK FRIZZELL DARRYN GEORGE

PAT HANLY

Otama Flat Road - West of Gore (2019)

Garden of Eden (6-9-20) (2020)

Inside the Garden (1960/2020)

All prices are NZD and include GST. Prices are current at the time of the exhibition.

CHRIS HEAPHY

MICHAEL HIGHT

MICHAEL HIGHT

RALPH HOTERE

YUKI KIHARA

SANDRO KOPP

ANDY LELEISI’UAO

EUAN MACLEOD

KARL MAUGHAN

MARK MITCHELL

LISA REIHANA

IAN SCOTT

IAN SCOTT

MICHAEL SHEPHERD

TERRY STRINGER

GRAHAME SYDNEY

GORDON WALTERS

TOSS WOOLLASTON

TOSS WOOLLASTON

Truth is Nothing Yet (2023)

Kupu Arataki (2020)

Rakiura (2021)

Gates of Haast (2021)

Winter Solstice (1988)

Whakatu Freezing Works, Heretaunga (2017)

Mermaid Mnemonics (2023)

Utilitas People of Lemeads (2016)

Digging / Painting / Rain (2009)

Mangarimu (2005/23)

School Road Track (2021)

Adorning Rangi (2021)

Lattice No.16 (1977)

Small Lattice No. 427 (2012)

Maungataketake Mountain, Ihumātao (1985)

Egyptian Child (2022)

Westerly at Dusk (2023)

Tamaki (1983)

Brownacre (1992)

John Foster (1972)