MASTERWORKS by Milford Galleries

MASTERWORKS 17 JUNE - 18 JULY 2022

www.MilfordGalleries.co.nz

CONTENTS

click on artist name to jump to that page

RALPH HOTERE

Ruia Ruia (1977)

FRANCES HODGKINS

Untitled (Possibly London after the Blitz) (1946)

TERRY STRINGER

Flora Totem (2009)

KARL MAUGHAN

Pirinoa (2022)

PAUL DIBBLE

Parallel Worlds (2013)

ANN ROBINSON

Black Moon Transit (2012/13)

IAN SCOTT

Small Lattice No. 425 (2011)

MILAN MRKUSICH

Project II Blue (1982)

DICK FRIZZELL

Marsden’s Books (2022)

PAT HANLY

Lunar Love (1981/2019)

LISA REIHANA

PELT - Aquila (2010)

CHRIS CHARTERIS

Kaitiaki (2018)

W D HAMMOND

C.V. Service (1991)

JEFFREY HARRIS

Untitled (Self Portrait) (1980)

ANDREW MCLEOD

Seascape (2010/11)

ROSS RITCHIE

Eclipse (1995/96)

YUKI KIHARA

National Biocontainment Laboratory (2021)

ROBERT JAHNKE

Lamentation II (Ko Ngā Manu o Ngā Manu) (2019)

MERVYN WILLIAMS

Flashpoint (Gold) (2012)

CHRIS HEAPHY

Hata Waits (2017)

TERRY STRINGER

Adore (2007)

NEIL DAWSON

Kakapo Down Feather (2022)

MARK MITCHELL

Blue Horizon (2022)

MICHAEL HIGHT

Omarama Night (after McCahon) (2002)

CHRIS CHARTERIS

Wasekaseka (2021)

YUKI KIHARA

Fa’afafine - In the Manner of a Woman (2005/20)

LISA REIHANA

Pearly Gates (2005)

HEATHER STRAKA

By Appointment (2001)

DARRYN GEORGE

Garden of Eden (6-10-20) (2020)

NEIL DAWSON

Kaka Down Feather (2022)

CHRIS HEAPHY

Once in a Lifetime (2017)

IAN SCOTT

Night Express (1984)

MARK MITCHELL

Waterfall (2022)

DICK FRIZZELL

Marsden’s Roses (2022)

KARL MAUGHAN

Dry River (2022)

PAUL DIBBLE

Dancing with the Devil (2007)

MICHAEL HIGHT

Manuherikia (2006)

ANN ROBINSON

Large Geometric Vase (Semillon) (2019)

RALPH HOTERE 1

Ruia Ruia (1977) acrylic on hardboard frame: 942 x 739 x 22 mm panel: 799 x 595 mm signed, dated, inscribed “test piece for Auckland International Airport Mural” verso

Ruia Ruia is an important companion work to the multi-panel Godwit/Kuaka (1977) – previously called The Flight of the Godwit. That work, universally acknowledged as one of the seminal works of New Zealand art, was commissioned for the arrivals lounge at Auckland International Airport and is now in the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery. Emblematic and elegant, Ruia Ruia is a visual conversation about light and dark, life and death. It speaks of a world that is cyclical. Hotere’s trademark-use of the circle encapsulates a painted surface of delicate scumbling, explicitly referencing natures patterning. In this complete manner, he delivers a philosophical and cultural statement about interconnectedness while developing profound sensations of spirituality.

Pricelist

Contents

It is a contemplative, emotionally resonant, chromatically dense work. ‘Ruia Ruia’ meaning ‘to scatter’ or ‘to sow’ has an additional definition ‘to cause to fall in drops.’

FRANCES HODGKINS 2

Untitled (Possibly London after the Blitz) (1946) gouache on paper frame: 666 x 836 x 34 mm painted image: 360 x 550 mm signed, dated bottom left

Completed in the year of her acclaimed retrospective at the Lefervre Gallery, London, and one year before her death, Untitled (1946) is a triumphant work. It resolutely contrasts the rhythmic ruins of London after the Blitz with the effervescent splendours of blossom and the arrival of spring. Wonderfully assured, lyrical and mystical in the way it traverses time and place, Hodgkins has us witness nature reclaiming civilisation in a moment of twilight light. Frances Hodgkins, acknowledged as New Zealand’s first internationally significant artist, was a leading participant in the British modernist movement with “her work travelling across cultures and landscapes” 1 and acquiring a spontaneous sense of colour, form and calligraphy.

Pricelist

Contents

1. Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler, Frances Hodgkins European Journeys, Auckland Art Gallery, 2019, inside front cover.

TERRY STRINGER 3

Flora Totem (2009) cast bronze edition 1 of 2 height: 3840 mm including base

Terry Stringer “sculpts his narrative round the three-dimensional form.” 1 He provides portions, slices, features and symbols as clues and cues. Deeply conscious of how a viewer engages with and enters the story being told, Stringer elicits, suggests and states while also leaving a potent space for imagination to function, thought to connect. “Eyes are the mirror of the soul. They are openings within which can be divined the animating presence behind the physical mask of body.” 2 Flora Totem is a major work about our natural environment. The key subject is regeneration, with the Goddess Flora personifying Nature’s exuberance. It has a rata flower head atop, the three sides transitioning from the side of a face to fingertips to a stacked medley of leaves and seed pod forms.

Pricelist

Contents

1. Mark Hutchins-Pond, Terry Stringer Face/Space, Pataka Art + Museum, 2013, p. 6. 2. Terry Stringer and Witi Ihimaera, Mask and Mirror: An Artist’s Book, Iwa/Poi, 1994, p. 19.

KARL MAUGHAN 4

Pirinoa (2022) oil on linen stretcher: 1508 x 2000 x 35 mm signed, dated, titled verso

Acknowledged as one of New Zealand’s foremost living artists, Karl Maughan builds intricately painted ‘invented’ landscapes which elicit profound sensations of ‘being right there’. Commonly enlivened with suggestions of a path leading somewhere unknown and out of view, Maughan explores the structural architecture of a landscaped or cultivated garden though the expressive, musical languages of paint, the various trajectories of the artists hand revealed in every brushstroke. This combination of presence and tactility is further enhanced by a powerfully heightened, animated light.

Pricelist

Contents

Maughan achieves an unusual and rare duality in his paintings: they project into the viewer’s space and conversely invite the viewer inward to a journey and private experience without an actual narrative being told.

PAUL DIBBLE 5

Parallel Worlds (2013) cast bronze, corten steel edition 1 of 1 + 1 artist proof size: 3430 x 2116 x 807 mm

Parallel Worlds is one of Paul Dibble’s most important works. It features the huia which became for the artist “his adopted personal icon. The huia is intended to represent the Tararua mountain range, under which Dibble’s studio in Palmerston North shelters, for it was in the Tararuas that the last living huia was supposedly sighted. They were beautiful birds, their extinction a sad morality tale… The birds had evolved into the ultimate co-dependent couple… The loss of one bird resulted in the death of that complete family unit.” 1 Prized by Māori “for their tail feathers, recognised as a symbol of privilege… worn in the hair of chiefs and kept safe in waka huia (treasure boxes)” with the arrival of ornithologists like “well-known Buller… The Birds didn’t stand a chance.” 2

Pricelist

Contents

Using the metaphors of an abstracted tree upon which the huia perches with the circle of life underneath, Dibble delivers the symbolism and ultimate paradox of the tall, striding figure heading in a different direction. 1, 2. Paul and Fran Dibble, Paul Dibble: X - A Decade of Sculpture 2010-2020, Bateman, 2020, p. 109.

ANN ROBINSON 6

Black Moon Transit (2012/13) cast glass size: 123 x 547 x 547 mm signed, dated “2013”, inscribed “NZ” on side of base signed, dated “2012”, inscribed “1/1”, etched “NZ” verso

Ann Robinson is internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s most significant glass artists and the inventor of the cast glass technique. Black Moon Transit is one of only two works made with this degree of technical complexity. It is a pivotal work of singular importance in an outstanding career.

Pricelist

Contents

In Black Moon Transit the enormous technical accomplishment is that it is created in a single casting. The skill, precision and control required to deliver the arching thinner top surface with negligible imperfections is quite simply astounding. Further casting complexity is added with the dramatically emergent thickness of the internal rim. Suspended in open space, separate and together, Robinson adds another commanding element with the adroit placement of the black moon insert circling in the surface space. Metaphors and celestial facts abound, with the work evoking sensations of circular movement in the quiet and substance of space. The darker open band, the internal reveal and the wine-red light thrown underneath add a brooding quality and additional spatial and tonal depth to this most important work. Directly referencing the 2012 Transit of Venus (which lasted six hours and forty minutes), Robinson is also openly acknowledging the considerable contribution made to her work by the back-and-forth dialogues, about technique and the celestial sky, with long-term partner, stone sculptor John Edgar.

IAN SCOTT 7

Small Lattice No. 425 (2011) acrylic on canvas stretcher: 910 x 910 mm signed, dated “August 2011”, titled verso

Ian Scott’s extended Lattice Series of paintings is rightly acknowledged as one of the most significant suites of work in New Zealand art. Small Lattice no 425 is an outstanding example of how pattern becomes more. In an essay titled The Space in the Interlace, Edward Hanfling writes “there is more to his Lattices than flat patterns… What is significant is that they present a flat pattern while doing a whole lot of other things. They absorb, resolve and emblematise feelings, ideas and places. They do all this and still come out the other side as unified abstract pictures.” To this he adds, “from the beginning, Scott filled his Lattices with a new sense of space.” 1 The result is fluid, diagonal bands extend to the edges of the surface … there’s an illusion of symmetry, concluding that “the Lattices are about weaving, interrelating, interlacing… they suggest… things that can’t necessarily be pointed to or even articulated.” 2

Pricelist

Contents

1, 2. Edward Hanfling, Ian Scott: Lattices, Ferner Galleries, 2005, pp. 11, 44.

MILAN MRKUSICH 8

Project II Blue (1982) quadriptych; acrylic on hardboard size on wall: 600 x 2565 x 26 mm panels: 600 x 600 x 26 mm each signed, dated, titled verso on panel 1

Acknowledged as one of New Zealand’s leading abstract artists, Milan Mrkusich was a cerebral painter, seeking to connect the viewer with the personal and collective unconscious. He was not painting meaning but the feelings of perception through a synthesis of colour, structure and form. Concentrating on colour for its own sake and for the power it has to affect the senses, Mrkusich more than any other New Zealand artist asserts the importance of aesthetic satisfaction and transcendence. Project II Blue explores pictorial unity in its elongated format, as Mrkusich presents the subtle relationships between colour and chromatic structure. He “mingles and fuses surface and depth, form and content.” 1

Pricelist

Contents

Project II Blue is a serenely beautiful and masterfully delivered transformative work: it becomes a resonant and mesmeric field of colour where delicate, modulated tonal alterations occur and where the emergent scumbled presence also become alchemical and spiritual in nature. 1. Alan Wright and Edward Hanfling, Mrkusich The Art of Transformation, Auckland University Press, 2009, p. 87.

DICK FRIZZELL 9

Marsden’s Books (2022) acrylic, oil on linen frame: 1236 x 1035 x 77 mm stretcher: 1097 x 894 x 33 mm signed, dated “10/3/22”, titled bottom right

Marsden Hartley (1847-1943), considered one of the foremost American painters of the first half of the 20th century, rose to acclaim with Cezanne-inspired still life paintings. A pioneer of the American modernist movement, Hartley wanted to depict American life at the local level.

Pricelist

Contents

In openly acknowledging a debt to and enthusiasm for Hartley’s paintings, Frizzell – undoubtedly New Zealand’s most adroit and stylistically versatile artist – co-opts the classical traditions of art as he reasserts the significance of the regionalist impulse which has driven and so characterised his own work. While courageously playing with scale and the sensations of looking out from within, Frizzell, alert to all possibilities, builds pictorial puns with the titling of the books in the foreground. Which Marsden’s bible is it? Samuel’s or Hartley’s?

PAT HANLY 10

Lunar Love (1981/2019) stained, painted glass, made in collaboration with Suzanne Johnson & Ben Hanly frame: 840 x 830 x 25 mm

One of our truly great artists, Pat Hanly is a singular figure in New Zealand art with an acute emotional register, exhibiting a great vibrancy of colour and a deceptive ease of execution. Part-action painting and part tight form, Hanly’s works deliver a unique combination of a social conscience, great joyfulness and reflections on the human condition in outlined figure studies filled with energy and a pervasive innocence. Hanly worked with stained glass throughout his career and in direct collaboration with Suzanne Johnson and (son) Ben Hanly at Glassworks. Glass was for him a key material: it’s altering use of light and flat planes of colour are a fundamental aspect of his entire oeuvre.

Pricelist

Contents

In the stained-glass window rendition of Hanly’s iconic Lunar Love the symbolic subject is to the very front of the picture plane highlighted by organic ‘expanses of colour and light’ with the eye of innocence (in a heart-shaped face) staring resolutely back at the viewer. Gregory O’Brien, Pat Hanly, Ron Sang Publications, 2012.

LISA REIHANA 11

PELT - Aquila (2010) pigment print on paper edition 1 of 5 + 2 artist proofs frame: 1704 x 1706 x 55 mm sheet: 1600 x 1600 mm

Reihana’s Pelt - Aquila seems of this world but also apart from it. In this imagined space – part utopia, part dystopia – the frosted landscape becomes a character in the intrigue. Reihana’s remarkably deft balancing of the familiar and the strange draws the viewer irresistibly in. Unnervingly beautiful, we witness a conflation of animal and human, the recreation of the de-erotised female body as a chimeric, unsettling figure performing an intense moment of private ritual. One of the most important artists to emerge in the last decade, Reihana “builds a fiction that whisks myth” and a “possible future” powerfully together. 1

Pricelist

Contents

1. Rhana Devenport, “Lisa Reihana’s ‘Pelt and other Ustopian Fables,’” Contemporary Visual art + Culture Broadsheet, Vol 41, March 2012.

CHRIS CHARTERIS 12

Kaitiaki (2018) Coromandel andesite sculpture: 1010 x 600 x 100 mm signed, dated on bottom edge

Chris Charteris is a very considered and intuitive artist. He is attuned to what the stone says and what is present in it. In letting the materials speak for themselves, Charteris is alert to what is being released by his actions.

Pricelist

Contents

Kaitiaki sees a bird form emerge from Coromandel Andesite, it’s eye fixed firmly on the viewer, its elegant body and engraved patterning flowing like the stone itself. The form is delivered with noticeable sympathy and melodic harmony with and for the stone, its shape and the bird itself shown to be all-knowing.

W D HAMMOND 13

C.V. Service (1991) acrylic on kauri panel: 705 x 1060 x 45 mm titled top left; signed, dated bottom right

As revealed by the title, the enigmatic and unforgettable C.V. Service is also a noticeably autobiographical work. It openly acknowledges Hammond’s musical career as well as his long-term collaboration with Gavin Chilcott and specifically their ceramic plates. Hammond’s mastery – his deep and celebrated strangeness, the vertiginous perspectives, maze-like partitions, hierarchy inversions, things behaving like people – is everywhere evident: “the Great New Zealand Landscape has shrunk and come inside; it’s part of the furniture of the neurotic imagination.” 1 He positions microphones as devices listening to alpine landscapes, circuit boards, invented animals.

Pricelist

Contents

This is the psychic interior where even when absent, Hammond demonstrates that “people are not men alone in the landscape, rather hapless amplifications of their environments.” Isolated in space but united in relationship, Hammond develops an episodic narrative where “he wants to make you feel … wrenching contradictions between space and actor, body and thing… title and meaning.” 2 1, 2. Justin Paton, “Bill Hammond’s Apocalyptic Wallpaper”, Bill Hammond 23 Big Pictures, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 1999, pp. 8-10.

JEFFREY HARRIS 14

Untitled (Self Portrait) (1980) oil on hardwood frame: 1233 x 1230 x 53 mm panel: 1197 x 1197 mm signed, dated, titled, inscribed “Dunedin” verso

Untitled (Self Portrait) appeared in Harris’ major survey show in 1981, and in 1982 was selected to tour the United States and Australia as part of the prestigious Carnegie International.

Pricelist

Contents

The artist stands holding a long stick, the tip of which is blurred out. The hand is a stump - a reference to Kirchner’s 1915 painting Self-Portrait as a Soldier. “The pole now reminds me of the pole with the sponge that was used to wipe the blood of Christ on the Crucifixion. That would fit in with the mood of sacrifice which pervades the painting,” says Harris. 1 “What we see here is not so much an attempt to deliver an accurate likeness, but rather to capture an inscape, the artist’s state of mind. The face is undecipherable, erased by a Francis Bacon-esque smear of existential angst. The pose is that of the Modernist artisthero cross-pollinated with the kiwi ‘man-alone’. The abstract background references the Otago Peninsula filtered through Mrkusich’s formalism. Inside and outside merge as a geometric motif. The path trailing away can only be walked by one, leading to abrupt and forbidding cliffs.” 2 1, 2. Andrew Paul Wood in Jeffrey Harris, Five Important Paintings, Milford Galleries Dunedin, 2020.

ANDREW MCLEOD 15

Seascape (2010/11) oil on canvas stretcher: 1602 x 1602 x 38 mm signed, dated bottom right

Andrew McLeod is one of the leading figures of contemporary New Zealand art. Image driven, openly referencing the Northern European painting tradition, “his paintings are filled with art historical references which float in suspended animation. McLeod’s work is baroque, occasionally grotesque, an artist enthralled by… the classical masters.” 1 There is a “largesse and operatic grandeur” to Seascape. He re-combines beauty and melancholy, myth and place, nostalgia and the drama and stylistics of rococo in joint pursuit of “atmosphere and mood... and giving aesthetic pleasure.” 2

Pricelist

Contents

1. Megan Dunn, “Standing on the shoulders of giants – Megan Dunn interviews Andrew McLeod”, Off the Wall, Issue #1, March 2013. 2. Andrew Paul Wood, “Light from Behind”, Webb’s Catalogue, November 2019.

ROSS RITCHIE 16

Eclipse (1995/96) oil on canvas with attachments stretcher: 1654 x 1287 mm signed, dated lower right

Ross Ritchie is an important post-modern artist with works in institutional collections such as Auckland Art Gallery, Govett Brewster, Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Demonstrating an unusual preparedness to combine both figurative and abstract painting, Ritchie’s unique voice and command over technique enables both the subject and its delivery to be part of the conversation. It reveals him to be both a collector of ideas and artefacts and a remarkably dexterous painter.

Pricelist

Contents

Amongst its numerous narratives Eclipse addresses and conflates two which are of great historical and social importance: Cook’s First Voyage and the Transit of Venus in 1869 and the Second voyage which took Omai from Tahiti to London. Omai became the first South Seas Islander to visit England and in London he was a sensation and befriended by naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. Sir Joshua Reynold’s portrait of him – explicitly referred to by Ritchie – is regarded as a cornerstone work in British art. In Eclipse Ritchie suggests and implies, using multiple visual devices. Images of time passing and the possible consequences for Omai (and the South Pacific) are presented in a state of flux on the peaked, sketched barge board of a Tahitian whare.

YUKI KIHARA 17

National Biocontainment Laboratory (2021) from Quarantine Island series lenticular photograph edition 1 of 5 + 2 artist proofs frame: 1130 x 1536 x 40 mm

Pricelist

Contents

This key work in the Quarantine Islands series places Salome – Kihara’s time-travelling alter-ego – in the testing epicentre of New Zealand’s scientific response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Viewed from behind and deep into the work, Salome wistfully looks outside to both a different past and a brighter future. This exceptional lenticular photograph is further enlivened by the slowly declaring presence of the reflection in the ceiling: this functions ‘as a message in the sky’ and introduces dialogues about faith, dramatically adding (in all senses of that word) to the narrative about the important, critical role science performs.

ROBERT JAHNKE 18

Lamentation II (Ko Ngā Manu o Ngā Manu) (2019) wood, paint, vinyl, one-way glass, mirror, fluorescent lights, electricity size: 2193 x 672 x 232 mm

Lamentation II (Ko Ngā Manu o Ngā Manu) features a poem Robert Janke especially commissioned from Tina Makereti. Harnessing the plurality of the written word and voice – declamation, incantation, contemplation – Jahnke details and explores the great existential threat of our time: that of the relentless environmental damage and the over-arching reality of climate change.

Contents

Through the repetition, rotation and reflection of words and phrases, Jahnke also reveals the unstable nature of language and how meaning shifts between speakers and listeners, context and form. Light operates as a physical manifestation of these shifts and the animation it provides is a reminder of the mutability of interpretation. Jahnke frames the words of Makereti’s poem in a repetitive pattern of vertical fluorescent tubes. In this manner, he alludes in this pattern to ‘roimata torua,’ the tears of the albatross. Using this curtaining of tears, the metaphors of dark and light, the visual devices of mirrored reflection and infinite space, Jahnke reveals in a tale of complicity and anguish that everything is at risk: including the very basis of Māori society in a world where “whakapapa … the Māori philosophical concept of continuous time and infinite possibilities” is deeply threatened and ‘the earth is crying.” 1

Pricelist

1. Nigel Borell, Toi Tū Toi Ora Contemporary Māori Art, Auckland Art Gallery, 2022, p. 46.

MERVYN WILLIAMS 19

Flashpoint (Gold) (2012) acrylic on canvas stretcher: 1223 x 1068 x 34 mm signed, dated, titled verso

Mervyn Williams is a unique figure in New Zealand art. In a career distinguished by resolute focus on the sensory concerns of abstract art, he pioneered an intensity of illusion, spatial ambiguity and optical vibration that set him apart from all others. In Flashpoint (Gold) Williams creates powerful illusions of surface texture, the presence of light and three dimensionality, delivering this with “stealthy, finesse and virtuosity.” Demonstrating admirable refinement and sophistication, it resonates with a heraldic emphasis, the central block of colour activating the work “like a chord of thunderous sound.” 1

Pricelist

Contents

1. Edward Hanfling, Mervyn Williams, Ron Sang Publications, 2014, p. 292.

CHRIS HEAPHY 20

Hata Waits (2017) acrylic on linen stretcher: 1200 x 1600 x 36 mm signed, dated, titled verso

Hata, the stag waits. Phar Lap waits, a female rider from decades earlier is side-saddle on its back. Chris Heaphy builds parables, collapses time and explores signifiers of identity in his unique pictorial dialect. Deliberately fostering ambiguity, traversing vast tracts of history and time, he uses symbols, reconfigured artistic tropes, everyday objects and multiple artistic traditions in an elusive narrative. References abound, images of specific people (Te Kooti, Rua Kēnana, Rātana) appear, an array of native birds and objects populate spaces, a dynamic world and a myriad of events are implied and suggested.

Pricelist

Contents

Set in an abstracted colour field and lusciously silhouetted in pure colour against this, the leftwards orientation adds another layer of beguiling complexity: are they looking forwards or backwards? At the past or to the future?

TERRY STRINGER 21

Adore (2007) cast bronze, stainless steel plinth edition 2 of 3 sculpture: 880 x 455 x 410 mm stainless steel plinth: 740 x 504 x 503 mm signed, dated “17”, number at base

Terry Stringer is “recognised as a leading sculptor of his generation and a tour de force in contemporary New Zealand art.” He has developed “a distinct and easily recognisable style that pays homage to classical traditions while remaining innovating and challenging. His signature works have become synonymous with high-profile public sites throughout New Zealand.” 1 Adore began from a portrait of Kiri Te Kanawa by Terry Stringer commissioned for Aotea Centre, Auckland. From one side we see the smiling Diva, from another applauding hands interceded by the multiple facets of deep incisions and sinuous strands of hair. This sequential engagement in the round emphasises both the central importance of the Diva’s face, and the visual dynamics of the work while also “enhancing the form and mass of the sculpture.” 1

Pricelist

Contents

Adore is presented on a stainless-steel base which adds further drama and stage-like lighting to the faces of the work. 1. Mark Hutchins-Pond, Terry Stringer Face/Space, Pataka Art + Museum, 2013, p. 5.

NEIL DAWSON 22

Kakapo Down Feather (2022) acrylic, aluminium, polycarbonate, automotive paint size: 2005 x 810 x 300 mm

Neil Dawson is one of a very select few of New Zealand sculptors with an international standing. A central achievement in his work is to embody in pure space clusters of socio-cultural and global concerns.

Pricelist

Contents

In a major addition to his series of wall-mounted feather works, Neil Dawson has turned his attention to native bird down feathers. Mixing suggestion and statement together, demonstrating a wondrous control of fluxing colour and curling form, he delivers a work of considerable beauty while reminding us how precarious native avian life is.

MARK MITCHELL 23

Blue Horizon (2022) ceramic, terra sigillata, oxides, gold leaf size: 322 x 390 x 370 mm

Pricelist

Contents

Mark Mitchell, the recipient of prestigious awards such as the Portage, is an eminent New Zealand ceramist with a distinctive visual language. In Blue Horizon he uses colour, pattern and formal ridging with breath-taking restraint and control. He builds visual rhythms, creates illusionary planes, and delivers the vessel as a contemplative muse.

MICHAEL HIGHT 24

Omarama Night (after McCahon) (2002) 5 panels; resin, blackboard paint on paper and board size on wall: 541 x 2485 x 46 mm frames: 541 x 289 mm each signed, dated, titled, panel number, hanging instruction verso on each panel

“Michael Hight’s constructions evolved out of sculptural as well as painterly inquiry… adjacent areas of flattened, sonorous chromaticism – a honeyed gold, a blackboard black… positive and negative shapes that dovetail and interlock… their faint geometric lines and sporadic pointillism… articulate a relationship with the elemental world: with light and weather and time passing… lead us back to workday realities: to beekeeping… the marking on maps and road-signs…” 1 Michael Hight first rose to national prominence in the 1990’s with an extended series of acclaimed relief sculptures. “…honeycombed with meaning and echoes…” 2 In the apparently austere but mystically redolent Omarama Night (after McCahon) the geographical location is evoked in the title with a panoramic landscape sensed in a trail of dots referencing McCahon’s well-known extended series of the upper North Otago area. 1, 2. Gregory O’Brien, “Two Fields and a Shelf, Three Phases in the work of Michael Hight” in Crossing the

Pricelist

Contents

Line, Gow Langsford Gallery, 2014.

CHRIS CHARTERIS 25

Wasekaseka (2021) Southland golden quartz, handplaited Fijian coconut fibre, stainless steel cable size on wall: 2310 x 1010 x 100 mm (variable)

Pricelist

Contents

The necklace form in sculptural scale with its subliminal messages of love, spirituality and place, and South Pacific symbolism is now firmly linked to Chris Charteris. In Wasekaseka Charteris builds a broad cultural metaphor: the title explicitly references the Fijian necklace made from split whale teeth and bound with coconut fibre which is worn by chiefs and represents high honour. In this iconic work with the stones of Southland golden quartz stacked like serrated teeth, Charteris celebrates nature’s hand in the materials while celebrating and uniting South Pacific cultures.

YUKI KIHARA 26

Fa’afafine - In the Manner of a Woman (2005/20) triptych; pigment print on paper edition 12 of 25 + 5 artist proofs mount size: 750 x 870 mm each printed images: 480 x 640 mm each print signed, numbered, dated “2020” below printed image

The subject of countless essays and publications, represented in such prestigious collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, University of Cambridge Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, Fa’afafine - In the Manner of a Woman is acknowledged worldwide as a work of great significance. It has profound artistic importance delivered with significant political and social intent and complex, intersectional narratives. At the same time it asserts the legitimacy of indigenous culture and diverse gender identities.

Pricelist

Contents

Visually literate and layered, explicitly referencing Manet’s Olympia (regarded as one of the most scandalous paintings of the nineteenth century) in which Manet depicts a nude prostitute attended by a black servant, Kihara turns the work inside out by altering all the hierarchies and preconceptions. Using her own body as artistic material and the device of the triptych form as a sequence of subtle reveals, Kihara returns the gaze to the viewer and onto the assumptions and precepts of European art, cultural attitudes and customary binary thinking.

LISA REIHANA 27

Pearly Gates (2005) c-print mounted on dibond aluminium edition of 6 + 2 AP panel: 890 x 1280 x 4 mm

Pricelist

Contents

Delivered with a soft, constrained light, and functioning as a tonal essay, Pearly Gates invokes the presence of heaven while conflating the temptations of Eve with that of her sensuality. Using the device of a g-string waxed chord and an animated suggestive knot, Reihana resolutely draws our eyes to what is promised, an infused light beckoning.

HEATHER STRAKA 28

By Appointment (2001) oil on canvas board panel: 903 x 700 x 55 mm signed, dated, titled verso

Combining temporal references of stains, porcelain cracking, mercantile trademarks with consummate attention to the worked surface, Heather Straka delivers a trompe l’oeil masterclass in By Appointment. “Clearly a contemporary sense of humour is at work … Like Duchamp’s Fountain (2017), they bring the privy into the public arena and demands attention be paid to it.” Using different devices – humour and inference – Straka builds emotional resonance alongside visual delicacy. Developing as always in Straka’s work social reference points, By Appointment is animated by the “gentle mocking at work”, its illusionistic rendering delivered with absolutely convincing refinement and lightness of touch.

Pricelist

Contents

Peter Shand, “St Anne’s Marble”, Stain/Skvrna, Galerie via Art, Prague, 2003.

DARRYN GEORGE 29

Garden of Eden (6-10-20) (2020) oil pastel, acrylic on canvas stretcher: 1419 x 1872 x 55 mm signed, dated bottom left signed, dated, titled verso

In his career, Darryn George has demonstrated a “belief in the power and cultural force of pattern.” 1 George builds a parabolic idyll, a Christian narrative of the Garden of Eden, at a time when we all yearn for a world where we can keep hope alive, be free of hate and indiscriminate death. Building sensations of child-like wonder, containing a markedly naïve quality in its very essence, George alters scale. A packed audience sits facing a stage with tukutuku panels rising up to the sky in front of a waterlily pond behind which flowers the size of trees appear. Filled with rainbow hues, imagined plants, and a linear delineation, organic patterns enticingly emerge.

Pricelist

Contents

1. Justin Paton, Mana Magazine, 2008.

NEIL DAWSON 30

Kaka Down Feather (2022) acrylic, aluminium, polycarbonate, automotive paint size: 1985 x 860 x 410 mm

Kaka Down is a work of great deftness and awe-inspiring beauty.

Pricelist

Contents

In exaggerating the down feathers scale, Neil Dawson draws our eyes to the uniqueness of every barb and vane, and to how perfect and miraculous is the natural engineering which enables flight. His spectacular control and use of coruscating colour is completely convincing and wonderfully understated, being ‘housed’ in the aura of delicate softness down feathers alone possess.

CHRIS HEAPHY 31

Once in a Lifetime (2017) acrylic on Belgian linen stretcher: 1302 x 1003 x 35 mm signed, dated, titled verso

Pricelist

Contents

Using organic shapes and lines, Chris Heaphy builds an abstracted floral arrangement which is anything but standard. Meditative in nature and purpose it includes explicit references to Gordon Walters with whom Heaphy worked as his technician. At first the work seems flat but the viewing experience is noticeably activated by the optics of advancing and receding colours, and furthered by Heaphy’s subtle shifts in depth and space. This compelling ability to complicate, to evoke and stimulate while also achieving a zen-like quality marks Heaphy’s still life works apart and releases a singular beauty.

IAN SCOTT 32

Night Express (1984) # 290 from Asymmetric Chevron series acrylic on canvas stretcher: 2034 x 1375 x 35 mm

In Night Express, one of the key works in the “unjustifiably neglected” series of Asymmetrical Lattice and Chevron paintings and “significant for the ‘open’ and ‘easy’ control of space and colour”, 1 Ian Scott developed new ways of thinking. “The colour-bands, more various in their dimensions and irregularly spaced… where horizontals and verticals take the place of the diagonal bands of the Lattices… are also allowed to flow more freely…” The pictorial dynamics are consequently energised, “accentuating both the malleability and the ambiguity of the pictorial space,” the space created being remarkably “airy and flexible.” 2

Pricelist

Contents

1, 2. Edward Hanfling, Ian Scott: Lattices, Ferner Galleries, 2005, pp. 42, 62.

MARK MITCHELL 33

Waterfall (2022) ceramic, terra sigillata, oxides, silver leaf size: 323 x 385 x 378 mm

Pricelist

Contents

Mark Mitchell uses colour and line, surface and volume with considerable restraint and characteristic excellence in Waterfall. Inducing and harnessing optical effects with admirable control, Mitchell cogently articulates the surface achieving a balanced tension between what the light tells, what the dark hides, what the pattern begins.

DICK FRIZZELL 34

Marsden’s Roses (2022) acrylic, oil on canvas frame: 1184 x 933 x 76 mm stretcher: 1043 x 794 x 34 mm signed, dated “20/2/22”, titled bottom right

“Controlled by his intellect and ultimate pictorial discipline… strong sense of line, the probity of art” 1 Frizzell imbues this expansive work with the spectacle of invitation, that the beauty and sense of place, inside and out, are there to be celebrated.

Pricelist

Contents

1. Dr Mark Stocker, An Intelligent Young Persons Guide to Dick Frizzell’s Florals, Page Gallery, 2021.

KARL MAUGHAN 35

Dry River (2022) oil on linen stretcher: 1505 x 2000 x 35 mm signed, dated, titled verso

Dry River is a visual arcadia. A poem of place and a distinctly immersive experience.

Pricelist

Contents

Karl Maughan, with his virtuoso expressive powers and use of pure alla prima colour, delivers a masterclass with Dry River. Up close it is an abstracted symphony of colour and brushstroke; viewed from distance it coalesces into a representational idyll of great finesse and very commanding presence.

PAUL DIBBLE 36

Dancing with the Devil (2007) cast bronze artist proof 2 of 2 + edition of 2 size: 785 x 525 x 372 mm signed, dated “2008”, inscribed “AP” on base

Pricelist

Contents

One of the continuums of Paul Dibble’s acclaimed sculptural career has been the extensive narrative about damage to the New Zealand environment by humans who wilfully introduced pests and the rabbit in particular. In Dancing with the Devil Paul Dibble uses the acerbic savagery of humour, scale alteration and the indecency of celebratory dance to deliver the ultimate irony of his unmistakeable message.

MICHAEL HIGHT 37

Manuherikia (2006) resin, found weatherboard, blackboard paint panel: 531 x 351 x 35 mm signed, dated, titled verso

“Hight’s abstract works might have taken flight from… Matisse’s Nice studio, then crashlanded in the antipodes via Rosalie Gascoigne’s Canberra studio.” 1 “The surfaces of these panels often appear wind-altered, or scuffed… We observe abstract thought – the transcendent, originating schema – being weathered and conditioned by time and air, water and hard matter. This way, Hight’s refined and ‘otherworldly’ works are reinstated in the world of everyday, physical things. Without relinquishing their translucence…”, 2 surface and structural dialogues develop as Hight locates order and rhythm in a constructed object which talks of everyday use as well as time present and passing.

Pricelist

Contents

1, 2. Gregory O’Brien, “Two Fields and a Shelf, Three Phases in the work of Michael Hight” in Crossing the Line, Gow Langsford Gallery, 2014.

ANN ROBINSON 38

Large Geometric Vase (Semillon) (2019) cast glass size: 470 x 317 x 316 mm signed, dated, numbered 1/1 and inscribed “NZ” verso

This is the tallest Geometric Vase Ann Robinson has cast.

Pricelist

Contents

As the title suggests this vase is a study of pure flowing, rising, form. The supremacy of this achievement is revealed in the lightness of Robinson’s touch: the sides acidetched to a matt translucence, the rising edges separating them revealed to be worked back and suggestive of a bladed leaf, the top polished to a mirror finish enabling light to reveal the internal space and liberate the constituent colours of Semillon and its varying tones.

PRICELIST

click on artist name to jump to that page

RALPH HOTERE

Ruia Ruia (1977)

POA

FRANCES HODGKINS

Untitled (Possibly London after the Blitz) (1946)

POA

TERRY STRINGER

Flora Totem (2009)

POA

KARL MAUGHAN

Pirinoa (2022)

PAUL DIBBLE

Parallel Worlds (2013)

POA

ANN ROBINSON

Black Moon Transit (2012/13)

POA

IAN SCOTT

Small Lattice No. 425 (2011)

MILAN MRKUSICH

Project II Blue (1982)

DICK FRIZZELL

Marsden’s Books (2022)

62,500

PAT HANLY

Lunar Love (1981/2019)

49,500

LISA REIHANA

PELT - Aquila (2010)

25,000

CHRIS CHARTERIS

Kaitiaki (2018)

13,500

W D HAMMOND

C.V. Service (1991)

POA

JEFFREY HARRIS

Untitled (Self Portrait) (1980)

POA

ANDREW MCLEOD

Seascape (2010/11)

POA

ROSS RITCHIE

Eclipse (1995/96)

35,000

YUKI KIHARA

National Biocontainment Laboratory (2021)

19,500

ROBERT JAHNKE

Lamentation II (Ko Ngā Manu o Ngā Manu) (2019)

50,000

MERVYN WILLIAMS

Flashpoint (Gold) (2012)

29,000

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

52,500

27,500 POA

CHRIS HEAPHY

Hata Waits (2017)

26,000

TERRY STRINGER

Adore (2007)

44,000

NEIL DAWSON

Kakapo Down Feather (2022)

30,000

MARK MITCHELL

Blue Horizon (2022)

MICHAEL HIGHT

Omarama Night (after McCahon) (2002)

25,000

CHRIS CHARTERIS

Wasekaseka (2021)

26,000

YUKI KIHARA

Fa’afafine - In the Manner of a Woman (2005/20)

27,000

LISA REIHANA

Pearly Gates (2005)

15,000

HEATHER STRAKA

By Appointment (2001)

15,000

DARRYN GEORGE

Garden of Eden (6-10-20) (2020)

24,000

NEIL DAWSON

Kaka Down Feather (2022)

30,000

CHRIS HEAPHY

Once in a Lifetime (2017)

18,500

IAN SCOTT

Night Express (1984)

32,500

MARK MITCHELL

Waterfall (2022)

DICK FRIZZELL

Marsden’s Roses (2022)

57,500

KARL MAUGHAN

Dry River (2022)

52,500

PAUL DIBBLE

Dancing with the Devil (2007)

30,000

MICHAEL HIGHT

Manuherikia (2006)

ANN ROBINSON

Large Geometric Vase (Semillon) (2019)

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

5,000

7,500 45,000