Important Paintings & Contemporary Art

Catalogue 384 31 July 2014

Important paintings and contemporary art

IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART

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Catalogue 384 Foreword 6 - 7

The New Zealand Scene

8 - 9

The World of Art

10 - 11

The International Market

12 - 13

Fine Jewellery & Watches – Forthcoming Sale

14 - 15

Jewellery - Private Treaty Sales Services

16 - 17

Modern Design – Forthcoming Sale

18 - 19

Wine Curation Service

20 - 23

In Focus: The Helene Quilter Collection

24 - 29

Important Paintings & Contemporary Art – This Sale in Review

The Catalogue 33 - 140

Important Paintings & Contemporary Art

Illustrated: Lot 17, Colin McCahon, North Otago 7, front cover and verso illustrated inside front cover.

Inside back cover: Lot 43, Don Driver, Pink and Red Relief

Upcoming Auctions & Market Commentary 144 - 159

Upcoming Auctions & Market Commentary

Who to Talk to at Webb’s 161

Regional Services

162 - 163

Valuation Services

164 - 178

Webb’s Departments & People

171

The Last Word - Carey Young - Head of Fine Art Services, Wellington

Terms & Conditions & Index of Artists 169

Webb’s Terms & Conditions for Buying

170

Index of Artists

Webb’s Auction House. 18 Manukau Road, Newmarket, Auckland 1149, New Zealand Ph: 09 524 6804 E:auctions@webbs.co.nz www.webbs.co.nz CATALOGUE 384

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Arndt, Berlin – Singapore Daine Singer, Melbourne Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney David Pestorius, Brisbane Foxy Production, New York Gloria Knight, Auckland Hamish McKay, Wellington Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, Melbourne Michael Lett, Auckland Minerva, Sydney Murray White Room, Melbourne Neon Parc, Melbourne Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne Station, Melbourne Sutton Gallery, Melbourne Utopian Slumps, Melbourne

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WEBB’S

IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART Including the Helene Quilter Collection thursday 31 july 2014, 6:30pm

Wellington Evening Preview Thursday 17 Jul

6:00pm - 8:00pm

Wellington Viewing Fri 18 Jul

10:00am - 5:00pm

Sat 19 Jul

10:00am - 5:00pm

Auckland Evening Preview Wednesday 23 Jul

5:30pm - 7:30pm

Auckland Viewing Thur 24 Jul

9:00am - 5:30pm

Fri 25 Jul

9:00am - 5:30pm

Sat 26 Jul

11:00am - 3:00pm

Sun 27 Jul

11:00am - 3:00pm

Mon 28 Jul

9:00am - 5:30pm

Tues 29 Jul

9:00am - 5:30pm

Wed 30 Jul

9:00am - 5:30pm

Thur 31 Jul

9:00am - 12:00pm

Buyer’s Premium A buyer's premium of 15% will be charged on all items in this sale.

GST (15%) is payable on the buyer's premium only.

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

the new zealand SCENE.

Becky Nunes, Untitled, Te Tuhi Billboard Project

Te Tuhi billboard project Becky Nunes is the current artist exhibited as part of Te Tuhi’s Billboard project; her photographic trilogy explores notions of tapu in relation to the civic and commercial use of land and natural resources. Te Tuhi is located on Reeves Road in Pakuranga and its public

artworks scheme offers artists the opportunity to exhibit works on a grand scale and outside of a gallery context.

Previous practitioners who have participated in the Billboard project include contemporary artists Bepen Bhana, Matt Ellwood, Fiona Jack and Andrew McLeod.

Artspace: New Director Adnan Yildiz

Popular Productions, A Popular Productions NZ Today, 1990, 16mm film, 35min 25sec, Dir. Merit Groting, Audio. DJ Houso

Michael Lett: New Space Michael Lett gallery has relocated to a new exhibition space in the historic Union Bank of Australia and New Zealand building, designed by Mahoney and Sons in 1928.

The gallery’s return to Karangahape Road will be marked with an opening of works from The Estate of L. Budd. The relocation of the gallery from its previous premises on Great North Road reinforces Karangahape Road as a vital location at which to view important works by emerging as well as established artists.

Where Michael Lett, Auckland When 02 July – 02 Aug 2014 6

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Artspace has announced a new director, Adnan Yildiz, who will take up a three-year term with the contemporary art space. Yildiz has been the artistic director of the Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany, since 2011 and has previously been a curatorial collaborator for the Istanbul Biennial. “(Yildiz) brings with him a passionate interest in blending local and international perspectives into productive dialogue. He comes with a unique perspective for Auckland, and a highly idiosyncratic view of the world,” stated Hanna Scott, a member of Artspace’s board of trustees. The announcement was made at the launch of the Artspace Benefactor programme, which endeavours to encourage individuals to support Artspace.

Pataka Art + Museum: Seraphine Pick, Looking Like Someone Else A solo exhibition of portraits, titled Looking Like Someone Else: Portraits by Seraphine Pick, is currently on view at Pataka Art + Museum in Porirua. The exhibition, comprising works spanning two decades of her practice, offers a glimpse into Pick’s consistent exploration of likeness, identity and the human condition. The exhibition is Pick’s first at Pataka and nearly all of the works have been loaned from private collections, offering viewers an opportunity to gain insight into the artist’s practice.

Where Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua When 30 May – 20 Sept 2014

WEBB’S

Grant Stevens, What We Had Was Real and New Work City Gallery Wellington and Starkwhite, Auckland, are presenting two bodies of work

by Australian artist Grant Stevens. City Gallery will showcase works previously exhibited at LA Louver, California, in 2013, alongside works exhibited at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) in 2010. Stevens’ work explores vernacular truisms, meditation videos, mass media and cinematic clichés. Utilising pared-back mind-maps and clouds, Stevens highlights not only the “machinery of emotional manipulation, but also the human psychology that is prepared to be manipulated”, says City Gallery curator Robert Leonard. The exhibition at Starkwhite will focus on recent works created by the artist, including the work Haven, which guides the viewer through a meditative experience, through desire and doubt, and into a quest for inner peace. Stevens has previously exhibited at Starkwhite in 2009 and 2007, and the current exhibition was been assisted by the Australian Council.

Where City Gallery Wellington When 28 Jun – 07 Sept 2014

Clockwise from top: Grant Stevens, If Things Were Different (video still), 2009, digital video, 18min 17 sec. Courtesy of the artist and Barry Keldoulis, Sydney. Grant Stevens, Supermassive (installation view), synchronized four-channel video, 11min 19sec. Courtesy of the artist and LA Louver, Venice. Image credit: Jeff McLane. Grant Stevens, General Manager, 2008, lambda print, 1000mm x 700mm. Courtesy of the artist and Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.

Walters Prize 2014: Judge Announced Charles Esche (left), director of Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands and co-founder and co-editor of Afterall journal and Afterall Books, has been named as the international judge for this year’s Walters Prize. Esche has stated that he would like to meet each artist and explore the idea of contemporary art in New Zealand, alongside his formal duties as judge. Simon Denny, who has been named to represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2015, is one of the finalists, alongside Maddie Leach, Luke Willis Thompson and Kalisolaite ‘Uhila. Each artist will exhibit their work at the Auckland Art Gallery until 12 October and the winner, selected by Esche, will collect $50,000.

Where Auckland Art Gallery When 12 Jul – 12 Oct 2014 CATALOGUE 384

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

The World OF ART.

Francis Bacon’s Portrait of Lucian Freud to be Sold from the Collection of Roald Dahl A portrait of Lucian Freud, painted by Francis Bacon and owned by Roald Dahl, is due to be sold at Christie’s this month.

After the financial success of his most famous book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl purchased the work in 1967 for £2,850 (around £45,200 when adjusted for inflation). The work is estimated to sell for around £12,000,000. The proceeds of the sale will be invested in The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre and be used for the continuation of other philanthropic work initiated by Dahl during his lifetime.

Francis Bacon, Study for Head of Lucian Freud, 1967, oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5 cm

Digital Art by Andy Warhol Discovered on Old Amiga Disks A stash of 30-year-old Amiga disks has been found to contain 18 previously unseen digital artworks

by Andy Warhol. In 1985, Commodore International commissioned Warhol to use its new graphics program to produce an image for the launch of Amiga 1000. For the launch, Warhol produced a portrait of Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry but artist Cory Arcangel had a hunch that Warhol might have produced other works also, using the same technology.

After gaining permission to search the collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Arcangel discovered an old Amiga computer complete with a set of disks. At the request of Arcangel, for the past three years, staff and students at Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club had been reverseengineering these disks in an attempt to unlock their contents. Saved in an obscure and out-of-date format, with filenames such as “campbells.pic”, “andy2.pic” and “marilyn1.pic”, these files represent some of the earliest instances of an artist working with purely digital material.

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Banksy’s First Retrospective Held at Sotheby’s An unauthorised retrospective of over 70 paintings by Banksy has been curated for Sotheby’s by his former agent, Steve Lazarides. The exhibition, which is Banksy’s largest to date, includes works valued at between £4,000 and £500,000, some of which originally sold for as little as £50.

The Unauthorised Retrospective opened at Sotheby’s S/2 Gallery in London on 11 June and runs until 25 July.

WEBB’S

Saatchi Sells Tracey Emin’s My Bed for £2,546,500 Tracey Emin’s My Bed – one of the most iconic examples of work made by the socalled Young British Artists that dominated British contemporary art in the ’90s – has sold at Christie’s for an astounding £2,546,500.

Purchased by Charles Saatchi in 1998 for £150,000, My Bed comprises the bed on which Emin spent the aftermath of a bad breakup; it is littered with a collection of objects that include vodka bottles, stained sheets, a pregnancy test, underwear, condoms, cigarettes and a stuffed toy dog.

Tracey Emin, My Bed, photo by Regan Forrest.

Tate Modern Gifted Works

by Cy Twombly worth £50 million Following Cy Twombly’s wishes before his death in 2011, three paintings from his Bacchus series and five bronze sculptures have been donated to the Tate Modern by the Cy Twombly Foundation. The creation of these works was prompted by a particularly successful room of Bacchus paintings that were brought together for the Tate’s Twombly retrospective in 2008. Subsequently, Twombly produced these three additional paintings that have, up until now, been on permanent loan to the Tate. Collectively valued in the region of £50 million, this donation is one of the most generous gifts the Tate has ever received.

Lisson Gallery, photo by Jason Schmidt.

Lisson Gallery Expands to New York Recently, the Lisson Gallery has announced the opening of a new 8,500-square-foot permanent exhibition space in the Chelsea neighbourhood of New York.

Located in a newly constructed building under the High Line, the new space will present exhibitions by the 46 artists and estates that the gallery already represents in its three other spaces in London and Milan, many of whom are not currently represented by galleries in the United States.

Photo by Pat Whitehead; Cy Twombly installation at Tate Modern, London, 2012

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The international market.

Webb’s New York correspondent, Sophie Wallace, provides commentary on the latest developments of the international art market.

Art World Welcomes ‘The New Basquiat’, Albeit with Skepticism At age 25, Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo was cleaning offices and selling his abstract paintings for US$3,000 each to fund his way Jean-Michel Basquiat through London’s Royal College of Art. Yet in a series of auction frenzies two years later, collectors were paying US$300,000 for his works. His untitled 2011 painting featuring spray paint and dirt fetched more than eight times the high estimate when it sold for US$401,000 at Phillips, New York in 2013.

Sudden demand for Murillo’s work is reminiscent of the upward trajectory that shot Jean-Michel Basquiat to fame in the 1980s. With his painting Dustheads selling for more than US$48.0 million at Christie’s last year, Basquiat’s works continue to stand the test of time. Murillo’s fate rests in the hands of powerful collectors, curators and dealers; will his work even reach reserve at upcoming auctions, will he be merely another ‘art bubble’ and will the bubble pop?

Oscar Murillo in his studio (above). Oscar Murillo, Untitled, 2011. oil, oil stick, graphite, dirt on canvas, 220 x 170 cm (bottom left).

Oscar Murillo, Untitled, 2012, oil, oil stick, spray paint, dirt on canvas, 218.1 x 167.3 cm (bottom right)

Secondary Market Success

Peter Doig, Gasthof, 2002-2004, oil on canvas, 274.5 x 200cm

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The Post-War and Contemporary Art auctions at Sotheby’s London and Christie’s London this July verified the strength of the market, with powerhouse dealers and collectors descending from around the globe for a highly anticipated week of sales. Sotheby’s grossed £93,147,500; the success of the evening, due in part to Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer, which sold for £26,682,500, also came down to living artists such as Peter Doig and Adrian Ghenie who set new records for their works. Christie’s London also experienced the brawniness of the market with sales totaling £99,413,500. Peter Doig’s Gasthof sold for £9,938,500, breaking the artist’s record that had been set the day before at Sotheby’s when Country-rock (wing-mirror) sold for £8,482,500.

WEBB’S

Prices for Koons’ Sculptures Continue to Soar The art world was a flurry with everything ‘Jeff Koons’ this June, with the launch of his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the unveiling of his sculpture at the Rockefeller Center. This polarising artist, who broke the record for the most expensive living artist at auction when his Balloon Dog (Orange) sold for US$58.4 million at Christie’s in 2013, continues to rake in extraordinary prices. More recently, 12 of his sculptures have sold for more than US$10.0 million each, three have sold for more than US$20.0 million each, and two have sold for more than US$30.0 million each; these results include the sale of Jim Beam J.B. Turner Train which went for US$33.8 million at Christie’s New York last month. The intensity of demand for Koons’ sculptures shows no signs of slowing down, with artnet estimating the works in his retrospective to be worth a cumulative US$504.0 million.

Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Orange), 1994-2000, mirror-polished stainless steel, 307.3 x 363.2 x 114.3 cm

Recordbreaking Season for International Auction Houses This year’s compelling auction results in New York suggest a growing appetite for contemporary art across the international marketplace.

Christie’s New York Mark Rothko, Untitled (Red, Blue, Orange), realised a record-breaking total of US$975.0 million at its annual Post-War and Contemporary Art auction this May, including the highest combined auction total in one evening of US$745.0 million.

Most notably, Barnett Newman’s Black Fire I sold for just over US$84.1 million and Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards sold for US$80.8 million.

Sotheby’s New York moved US$364.4-million worth of contemporary art in its corresponding auction. Highlights included Andy Warhol’s Six Self Portraits and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta which sold for more than US$30.1 million and US$23.6 million, respectively. Phillips New York also yielded topdollar prices, with Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Red, Blue, Orange) selling for just over US$56.1 million.

Institutional Growth It is a time of growth in the art world: numbers of artists, collectors, dealers and museum attendees.

No city has manifested this phenomenon more so than has New York, where museums including The Frick, The Met, MoMA and The Whitney are planning major expansions and relocations to accommodate larger exhibition spaces and crowds. Museum culture has changed significantly over the past decade, with visitors now expecting to interact with and be entertained by the art.

Yet there is a fine balance to be struck between displaying meaningful and contemplative art, and providing stimulating experiences. The former is driven by the primary function of museums, as

The Frick Collection, New York (top). Plans for the Whitney Museum of American Art expansion (below).

repositories of valuable objects that promote the arts and educate the public, while the latter is driven by entertainment and profit. As museum expansions become commonplace, we must question whether they are happening for the right reasons.

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Fine Jewellery & Watches Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

Fine Jewellery and Watches Saturday 2 August, 11am & 3.30pm 12

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WEBB’S

A dazzling catalogue of fine jewellery and watches celebrates the new jewellery team’s first anniversary.

The quality and breadth of offering presented over the past year spearheaded the jewellery market at auction.

Our first auction curated by the dynamic new jewellery team of Zora Bell Boyd, Peter Downey, Anna Carr and Ruri Rhee held in August 2013, achieved record-breaking sales totalling $800,193 and a 34% increase on average turnover for jewellery compared to 2012. With 10 auctions conducted subsequently and numerous record highlights across the past year, it is expected the August 2014 sale will be no exception.

Offered in our August catalogue is an extensive and exclusive selection of fine jewellery, watches and objects of virtu. Featuring stunning diamond jewellery spanning a variety of periods and styles; the sale includes rings, bracelets, earrings and necklaces in varied carats, clarity and colours and at a range of price points.

Although diamonds may be forever, the sale also offers a raft of exquisite coloured gems, which will dazzle with Lot 48. A stunning 3.10ct solitaire diamond.

Estimate $45,000 - $60,000

their brilliance. From emeralds, opals, sapphires and rubies to a selection of more exotic gemstones such as tourmalines, topaz, tanzanite, Jadeite, and kyanite, there are jewels for every occasion and every season in this sale.

A highlight for purveyors of precious stones is an exceptional 16.86ct blue/ green emerald, which intriguingly has inclusions indicative of Columbian origin.

For admirers of fine crafted time-pieces, the sale includes an interesting collection from the Swiss luxury brand Heuer including a vintage Heuer German Bundeswehr Military “Flyback” chronograph wristwatch with manual wind movement, black face and rotating bezel. Heuer watches from this era embody modernist principals that began in the early 1960s with simple, wellproportioned designs that are at once aesthetically pleasing and functional.

For collectors of vintage timepieces, Hodinkee (one of the most widely read wristwatch publications in the world) considers the Heuer Bundeswehr watch an underrated classic and an excellent investment at an affordable entry-level price point.

Lot 102. An Art Deco style sapphire and diamond ring $25,000 - $30,000

Lot 41. A Vintage Heuer German Bund Military “Flyback” chronograph wristwatch. Estimate $3,000 - $3,500

The scarab vinaigrette necklace and matching ring, circa 1895, will appeal to collectors of rare and curious jewels. It is adorned with mixed cut emeralds, sapphires and rubies that open to reveal a beautifully pierced and engraved snuff plate.

View the Fine Jewellery and Watches online catalogue to discover more about the range of pieces available.

Entries are now invited for our next auction, to be held in September, and market appraisals are offered free of charge. Our experienced and knowledgeable team approaches the appraisal, consignment and sale of each item with the utmost attention to detail and care throughout the process. With multiple marketing channels and an extensive network of industry and individual contacts to support our digital and premium printed catalogue promotion, Webb’s offers an enhanced selling experience, increasing the effectiveness of the selling process.

Lot 69.A pair of fancy coloured diamond drop earrings.

Estimate $17,500 - $18,500

Fine Jewellery & Watches When Saturday 2 August 11am Where Webb’s Auction House

jewels buy - sell - collect When Saturday 2 August 3.30pm Where Webb’s Auction House CATALOGUE 384

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

Private Jewellery Sale Services 14

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WEBB’S

In addition to six auctions annually, our jewellery team also offers a private sale service for clients wishing to purchase investment-quality loose diamonds of any size, colour, clarity and cut. Direct access to an international diamond supply uniquely qualifies Webb’s to privately broker the sale of large diamonds in a confidential and private sale setting.

Quotes are free of charge, confidential, and all consultation is on a no-obligation basis. Telephone 09 529 5606 or email Zora Bell Boyd zbellboyd@webbs.co.nz for further information.

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Modern Design Its Enduring Popularity

Record sales, both internationally and here at Webb’s, are testament to the enduring appeal and relevance of midcentury furniture and furnishings. Entries are now invited for a forthcoming auction of Modern Design in collaboration with Mr. Bigglesworthy to be held in November.

Characterised by the modernist principles of simplicity and functionality, mid-century modern design rose to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s with a fresh aesthetic of sculptural and organic furniture that was elegant yet comfortable. Using natural woods, and bold colours and patterns, midcentury design perfectly complemented the emergence of apartment living and morerelaxed, informal living spaces, offering a balance of modernity and restraint that quickly resonated with the newly emerging consumer class. Designers created organic shapes with skilled use of texture, material and proportion resulting in furniture of enduring appeal crafted with a softness, warmth and sense of playfulness previously unseen in the home.

Fast-forward to today and the sleek simplicity and harmony of post-war furniture has once again captured the interest and imagination of collectors, with record international market performance and a well-established hierarchy of important designers and their major works. Demand at Webb’s for genuine vintage mid-century design is reflected in high sales rates by both volume and value as well as record attendance at sales. Buyers are looking to pieces from the big names in

mid-century design as collectable assets and as an investment class followed closely by rare and celebrated pieces from New Zealand designers.

In partnership with mid-century design aficionados Emma and Dan Eagle of Mr. Bigglesworthy, Webb’s is proud to provide curated biannual auctions of the finest vintage mid-century furniture and furnishings. Sourced predominately from Denmark, America and Britain, the exceptional collections offered by Webb’s have provided a great selection of rare design icons to local collectors.

The enduring popularity of post-war furniture and the resulting auction records are of no surprise to Peter Loughrey, founder and director of Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA), one of the first US auction houses to specialise in modern design. A record US$5.12 million was achieved for a recent auction at the house. “We are building upon what we first innovated two decades ago,” said Loughrey; “its popularity at auction has gone far beyond simply trendy, to something much more substantial in art and design collecting.”

Contact Josh Williams jwilliams@webbs.co.nz / 09 524 6804

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

Specialist

wine cellar services

This full service for the establishment of cellar collections includes acquisition and investment advice, storage solutions and valuations for market and insurance purposes.

In addition to leading the New Zealand auction market with eight sales of fine and collectable wines annually, Webb’s wine specialist, Simon Ward, offers a full cellar establishment service.

This is a specialist service for those seeking to build or upgrade their cellar collections, which includes advice on procuring wines at wholesale prices, cellaring for long-term investment, establishing a suitable physical environment in your home or off site and locating rare wines in smaller quantities to order. A personalised cellar system includes a hold/consume strategy to ensure you receive

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maximum benefit and pleasure from your collection. For those who have cellars under way, Simon will evaluate the scope of your collection, help to determine your collecting priorities and, if required, provide current valuations for market and insurance purposes.

Please contact Simon Ward, director of Webb’s Fine and Rare Wine department to discuss this bespoke cellar curation service.

Simon Ward wines@webbs.co.nz / 09 529 5600

WEBB’S

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Helene Quilter Collection of Contemporary Art Images that Occupy the Mind

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WEBB’S

The collection of Helene Quilter is a poignant and highly important body of works assembled predominantly during the 1990s. While to acquire works that reflected the period-in-time in which they were made was not her intent, an enlightened awareness of contemporary practice and an innate attraction towards artistic practice that expressed “powerful ideas” saw Helene Quilter build a renowned collection of works from a decade in which New Zealand artists assessed both their own cultural heritage and the notion of identity altogether.

L. Budd, Fig 1 – 12, estimate, $25,000 - $35,000

Michael Stevenson, The Rodney King Incident, estimate, $8,000 - $12,000

Helene Quilter developed an interest in modernist New Zealand painting at a young age and her practice as a collector started with acquiring works by well-known New Zealand artists with whom she had a strong affinity. While most of these works are no longer in her collection, the early purchases included paintings by artists such as Ralph Hotere, Jeffrey Harris, Tony Fomison and Colin McCahon. Quilter’s holistic philosophy towards collecting and her recognition of the potential of art to “add so many dimensions into one’s life” soon compelled her to drill down and further engage with contemporary production, particularly in the context of the Wellington art scene. When viewed in retrospect, the works that Quilter would acquire throughout the 1990s would form two particular lines of enquiry: surveying in great depth both painting and conceptual art from the period.

The collection includes a number of major paintings by artists who are now recognised as leading proponents of the medium’s development throughout the 1990s.

These include: GST by Bill Hammond, a monochromatic triptych on loose cotton painted in the same year as was the stylistically similar Buller’s Table Cloth (1994 – collection of Auckland Art Gallery); Flight Recorder

by Bill Hammond, an expansive

Tony de Lautour, Masterplan, estimate, $12,000 - $18,000

painting dated 1998; a suite of six smaller-format portraits by Séraphine Pick dated 1997; and further paintings by Tony de Lautour and Peter Robinson. The notions of personal and national identity were widely explored in the painting of this period; however, when questioned about the significance of the notion of nationalism to her practice as a collector – not in relation just to her acquisition of contemporary paintings but also to her earlier purchases of modernist paintings – Quilter CATALOGUE 384

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

“I’ve always loved living with art because I think it adds so much into one’s life. I like the idea that I am surrounded by powerful ideas expressed in art or the authentic voice of an artist or, indeed, that I have

Bill Hammond, G.S.T, estimate, $30,000 - $40,000

says of her motivations: “I wasn’t attracted by the idea of nationalism; I was attracted by the idea of very strong contemporary art in a New Zealand context”. It was precisely this approach that resulted in a collection that sees included artists represented to their best advantage.

The conceptual artworks acquired

by Helene Quilter form a particularly special component of her collection, given that the early 1990s – when the works were acquired – was the time when conceptual practice first rose to prominence in New Zealand. The collection includes rare examples from artists such as

Bill Hammond, Flight Recorder, estimate, $120,000 - $160,000

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Michael Stevenson, L. Budd, Julian Dashper and Ronnie van Hout, all of whom would go on to develop significant international reputations and receive noteworthy accolades in the years since the works were acquired. L. Budd, as a member of the et al collective, won the Walters Prize in 2004 and Michael Stevenson was short-listed for the prize in 2010.

His nominated project Persepolis 2530 (2007), however, was too large to install at Auckland Art Gallery and thus wasn’t included in the final exhibition. L. Budd’s practice was a particular area of commitment for Quilter who describes her as “an artist who has that potent power to grip your

history around me.”

Helene Quilter, 2014

imagination” and the nine works by Budd included in this sale range from the early Becoming Joan of Arc to the monumental, supremely important Fig 1–12.

The role of the dedicated contemporary collector has long been recognised as integral to market development and the crystallisation of artistic reputation. Indeed, through engaging on the most fundamental and direct level with contemporary artistic output, Quilter inevitably came

WEBB’S

Julian Daspher, Chain Frame, estimate, $3,000 - $6,000

Peter Robinson, The Queen is Dead! Long Live the King!, estimate, $15,000 - $20,000

Michael Stevenson, Mother of Harlots, estimate, $8,000 - $12,000

to contribute to this cycle of direct market input and, as such, to play an important role in informing and influencing primary market growth. In particular, Quilter felt “strongly about the relationship with the dealer… and being able to follow the relationship with an artist quite closely, to think and talk about their works, the context, and be very deliberate in my choices.” Quilter identifies her approach as being relatively holistic, recounting how she started “buying bigger pieces that couldn’t be housed domestically, as with the Fig 1–12 by L Budd, which I just thought was one of the most magnificent works – so profound, so formally beautiful, so aesthetic. I had a similar experience

when I bought the Bill Hammond Flight Recorder work: I didn’t have walls big enough to put them up but I just loved the works.”

Coupled with an aversion to “hordes of work being tucked away in private collecting homes”, Quilter’s belief that “people need to see, and understand, and be able to view” great works of art naturally led her to initiate a long-term loan of the collection to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 1998. These loaned works became the focus of a major exhibition at the Govett-Brewster in the same year.

Earlier, in 1995, selected works from the collection (GST by Bill Hammond and Fig 1–12) had been exhibited also

in A Very Peculiar Practice: Aspects of Recent New Zealand Painting at City Gallery Wellington; this was a seminal survey of New Zealand painting from the early 1990s. When asked about the dichotomy of parting with a collection such as this – it is essentially a grand project that, for many years, has occupied a great deal of her headspace – Quilter had this to say: “I’m not so sure about the idea of ownership... I suppose one owns the ability to have a painting with you for a period of time. In a sense, the collector is a steward but, ultimately, it’s the work and the artist that’s important, rather than the collector.”

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

Important Paintings & Contemporary Art This sale in review

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WEBB’S

Traversing critical periods that influenced the trajectory of artmaking in New Zealand, our winter catalogue surveys the lineage that ties our nation’s modern practice to that of the present day. The offering focuses specifically on the development from painting of the mid20th century to artistic production of the last decade and includes numerous examples from celebrated moments in our nation’s history that are rarely represented at auction.

Don Driver, Euclid, estimate, $25,000 - $35,000

Peter Stichbury, Elizabeth Klarer, estimate, $30,000 - $35,000

This catalogue is a journey through the key strategies, decisions and actions that have defined the historical narrative of art-making in New Zealand. Starting with modern painting of the 1950s – the decade in which McCahon made his first and only visit to America – the catalogue examines: the elementary approach to painting that was at the forefront of image-making in the 1960s; the conceptually ambitious and socially aware artistic practice of the 1970s; large-scale masterpieces by artists who first rose to prominence in the 1980s; and contemporary painting, photography and sculpture from the 1990s to today. Many of the works included in this sale are of a quality that will ensure that they are forever imbedded in the lexicon of the New Zealand art market.

Colin McCahon’s Elias (1959), from the collection of his dear friend and colleague Doris Lusk, anchors the catalogue’s suite of paintings from the 1950s. This work and another included in the sale – Landscape, Northland (1958) – were produced in the period directly subsequent to McCahon’s 1958 tour of America. Importantly, the paintings made during this period saw the artist turn away from the early20th-century European aesthetic ideals that influenced his earlier practice and instead focus on the approaches to painting championed by mid-century American painters such as de Kooning, Motherwell, Kline and Rothko. McCahon’s practice always had very deep philosophical concerns; however, after the ‘American experience’, existentialist ideals became a core tenet of his work.

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

Pat Hanly, A Young Love, Torso P, estimate $60,000 - $80,000

McCahon’s practice always had very deep philosophical concerns, however, after the ‘American experience’ existentialist ideals became a core tenant of his work.

Colin McCahon, Elias, estimate $250,000 - $300,000

The offering of Elias is extremely significant as, over the last 20 years, only three other text paintings by McCahon have ever been presented to the New Zealand auction market.

The 1960s saw McCahon pare back his approach to painting. Starting with the Gate paintings and moving through the serene Landscape Theme and Variations and Waterfall series, McCahon’s in-depth explorations into reductive imagery were crystallised by the North Otago Landscapes produced from 1965 to ’67. It is rare that works from this period are presented to the market and, accordingly, it is an immense privilege to present North Otago 7 (1967) in this catalogue.

These highly revered paintings capture McCahon at his very essence; they imbue the landscape with a deep spirituality and question its significance, both to human existence and to New Zealand’s nationhood and cultural identity. While the bare, grass26

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covered landscape was central to New Zealand’s once-predominant industry – farming – it was also the antithesis of the urban sprawl witnessed by McCahon in suburban Auckland.

North Otago 7 is an innate reflection of its time and a supremely important cultural document. Also included in the sale is a fine late-1960s’ landscape

by Don Binney which depicts Te Henga on Auckland’s west coast (1967), a favoured subject of the artist.

At the same time as artists like McCahon and Binney were honing their elementary approach to landscape painting during the 1960s, a number of other artists were pushing reductive imagery even further, opting for industrial materials and abandoning figurative content altogether. Euclid (1969) by Don Driver is an extremely rare work from the artist’s series of Relief paintings, produced in the late ’60s. The work is from the collection of well-known

Australian collector Kym Bonython, who acquired it from the Benson & Hedges Art Award in the same year that it was made. Due to the scarcity of exceptional examples from this series, public knowledge of the Relief works has been informed essentially by those that are held in museum collections and, therefore, the availability of Euclid is a significant opportunity for serious collectors of modern New Zealand practice. Also included are two minimalist paintings

by Ralph Hotere: Big Red X (1968), which belongs to a body of shaped paintings that the artist exhibited at Barry Lett Galleries upon his return to New Zealand from London in 1965, and Black Painting No. 39 (1970), a superb example of the refined lacquer paintings that were the foundation of Hotere’s career as a celebrated professional artist.

Defining works from the 1970s include a large-format work on jute from

WEBB’S

In Love Poem, Hotere’s finely controlled drips, washes and lines of bleeding paint echo the poetic qualities of the Bill Manhire’s quoted verse.

Don Binney, Te Henga, estimate $95,000 - $125,000

Colin McCahon’s Jump series. Based on McCahon’s observations of the fauna at Muriwai Beach, this body of work uses diagrammatic imagery to depict the first flight of a baby gannet.

In the words of McCahon biographer Gordon H Brown, “The Jump series has to do with the unpredictability of life, with the freedom to choose between security and the uncertainty of taking chances”. Love Poem (1976)

by Ralph Hotere, is one of the mostwidely celebrated paintings from the artist’s seminal series of Song Cycle banners. The work was included in the touring survey Hotere: Out the Black Window and was exhibited at the opening of the New Zealand embassy

in Washington D.C. in 1980. Love Poem, which uses text by Bill Manhire, sees Hotere at the height of his prowess with fluid paint and, in this work, the artist’s finely controlled drips, washes and lines of bleeding paint echo the poetic qualities of Manhire’s text.

Another work from the 1970s, Pat Hanly’s A Young Love (1977), belonging to the artist’s celebrated Torso series, employs a similarly poetic use of fluid paint. Hanly’s Torso paintings recall the memory of past female lovers and the manner in which they are described, using free-form lashings of colour, is sympathetic to the counter-cultural sentiment that pervaded popular culture of the time.

Ralph Hotere, Love Poem, estimate $190,000 - $250,000

Colin McCahon, North Otago Landscape 7, estimate $250,000 - $350,000

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

Michael Parekowhai, Atarangi No. 4, estimate $10,000 - $15,000

This catalogue presents a number of major, landmark paintings by artists who first rose to prominence in the 1980s. Dick Frizzell’s monumental The Sailor Returns (2007) – which, at first glance, reads simply as a pastiche of Picasso’s seminal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) – is a career-defining masterpiece that addresses the development of modern painting in New Zealand. The Sailor Returns is produced to exactly the same scale as that of Les Demoiselles – a tip-of-

the-hat to the fact that many of our nation’s most-revered painters of the 20th century experienced international painting through very small printed reproductions in books – and is an intended reference to the effect that isolation has had on New Zealand’s cultural production of the 20th century.

Also included in the catalogue are a number of significant works by Max Gimblett: Moby Dick – For Colin McCahon, Painter, Poet (1988), a triptych of three shaped canvases; The Hermetic

Left: Peter Robinson, Black Zero Shift, estimate $7,000 - $9,000 Above: Max Gimblett, One Stroke Bone, For Anthony Fodero, estimate $70,000 - $90,000

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WEBB’S

Shane Cotton, Broken Prayer, estimate $55,000 - $75,000 Dick Frizzell, The Sailor Returns, estimate $70,000 - $90,000

The shifting visual relationships depicted in McCahon’s two-year Necessary Protection series present the physicality of the land and its spiritual connection to those who subsist on it as being inextricably linked.

Museum (2009), an exceptional quatrefoil; and One Stroke Bone – For Anthony Fodero (2002), a major circularformat painting.

The inclusion of the collection of Helene Quilter – a major collector of New Zealand practice of the 1990s – sees painting and conceptual art from this period extensively surveyed in this catalogue; included are works by Bill Hammond, Peter Robinson, Seraphine Pick, Tony de Lautour, L. Budd, Michael Stevenson and Julian Dashper, among others. Prior to being presented to the market in this auction, the works had been on long-term loan to GovettBrewster Art Gallery and, in 1998 – the year in which the loan was initiated – the collection was the focus of a

major exhibition at the gallery. Before this, works from the collection were included in the seminal exhibition A Very Peculiar Practice – Aspects of Recent New Zealand Painting at City Gallery Wellington in 1995. An in-depth article on the collection is included on pages 20 to 23 of this catalogue.

Moving on from the 1990s, contemporary New Zealand practice from the last decade is also well represented. A number of works by pre-eminent painters are included, such as: Elizabeth Klarer (2013), a portrait

by Peter Stichbury of a well-known alien abductee; Shane Cotton’s Broken Prayer (2010), a work which relates to those which were recently the focus of the artist’s mid-career survey The Hanging Sky; and an untitled painting from 2008 by Rohan Wealleans. Additionally, the sale features sculptural works from critically praised artists such as Michael Parekowhai – included is a work from his Atarangi series (2004) – and Peter Robinson, whose practice is represented by Black Zero Shift, a work which relates to his solo presentation at the 49th Venice Bienale. Also presented are photographs by contemporary artists such as Yvonne Todd, Fiona Pardington, Jae Hoon Lee, Ronnie van Hout and Gavin Hipkins.

Colin McCahon, Jump E17, estimate $190,000 - $250,000

IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART When Thursday 31 July, 6:30pm Where Webb’s Auction House CATALOGUE 384

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prepare for the best‌

Wednesday 13 August Vernissage

6pm - 10pm

Thursday 14 August Friday 15 August Saturday 16 August Sunday 17 August

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For tickets and further information visit: melbourneartfair.com.au The Melbourne Art Fair is presented by the Melbourne Art Foundation, a not for profit organisation supporting living artists and contemporary art.

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Thursday 31 July 2014, 6.30pm

Important Paintings & Contemporary Art Wellington viewing Evening preview Thursday 17 July, 6:00pm-8:00pm Friday 18 & Saturday 19 July, 10:00am-5:00pm The Young, 2/7 Hawker Street, Mount Victoria, Wellington

Auckland viewing from Wednesday 23 July Evening preview Wednesday 23 July, 5:30pm-7:30pm

1 Pat Hanly

Golden Age

enamel on board signed P. H. and dated 80 with incision lower right; signed Hanly, dated 1980 and inscribed Series “Golden Age� in ink verso 304mm x 298mm

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Estimate $25,000 - $35,000

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2 Michael Parekowhai

Atarangi No. 4

two-pot automotive paint on aluminium Michael Lett gallery label affixed verso 300mm x 700mm x 100mm

Estimate $10,000 - $15,000

Atarangi No. 4 presents a dialogue about learning systems and the quest to retain knowledge. In particular, it speaks to the modern-day application of te reo Maori. Parekowhai references Cuisenaire rods, invented in the 1950s

by Belgian teacher Georges Cuisenaire as a method for teaching mathematics, which were adapted in the 1970s to teach Maori learners the spoken language in a technique called Te Ataarangi. Each coloured rod represents a unit of value, whether a number or syllable, and, when placed together, the rods compose something more unified. When viewed within the context of contemporary art,

the rods carry additional meaning – the work’s hard-edged form, solid colour and reflective surfaces speak to American Minimalism of the 1960s and 70s.

Atarangi No. 4 is a deeply enigmatic work that engages with the importance of maintaining a connection to one’s cultural heritage. In this work, Parekowhai has referenced patrimonies that he has both claimed and inherited.

ALEKSANDRA PETROVIC

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3 Michael Stevenson

The Rodney King Incident

charcoal on paper 550mm x 745mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay. On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 1998 – 2014. exhibited Hamish McKay gallery.

The Helene Quilter and Tony Chamberlain Collection, GovettBrewster Art Gallery, 1998.

Estimate $8,000 - $12,000

4 Michael Stevenson

Mother of Harlots

charcoal on paper 760mm x 560mm

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PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay. On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 1998 – 2014. exhibited Hamish McKay gallery.

The Helene Quilter and Tony Chamberlain Collection, GovettBrewster Art Gallery, 1998.

Estimate $8,000 - $12,000

5 L. Budd

Can one detach the thought from form

acrylic and oilstick on blind 730mm x 530mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay. On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 1998 – 2014. exhibited Hamish McKay gallery.

The Helene Quilter and Tony Chamberlain Collection, GovettBrewster Art Gallery, 1998.

Estimate $3,000 - $5,000

6 L. Budd

Devoid no. 18 fig 1

oil and coloured pencil on blind inscribed devoid no. 18 fig 1 in coloured pencil center edge 600mm x 500mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay.

exhibited Hamish McKay gallery.

Estimate $3,000 - $5,000

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7 Pat Hanly

Life Goes On

watercolour and ink on paper signed Hanly and dated 82 in ink lower right and inscribed Life Goes On in ink lower left 585mm x 555mm Estimate $15,000 - $20,000

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8 Tony Fomison #226 oil on jute on board inscribed #226 and Pat put himself on the line when he bought this picture of mine and Pat Hanly family trust collection 1978 in graphite verso 300mm x 400mm

PROVENANCE From the collection of Pat Hanly.

Estimate $25,000 - $35,000

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9 Max Gimblett

10 Tony de Lautour

Masterplan

The Hermetic Museum

gesso, acrylic polymers, epoxy, palladium leaf and Japanese leaf on wood panel signed © Max Gimblett, dated 2007 and inscribed “The Hermetic Museum” in brushpoint verso; Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso 1015mm x 1015mm

oil and acrylic on linen signed Tony de Lautour and dated 2000 in brushpoint lower right and inscribed MASTERPLAN in brushpoint lower left; Brooke Gifford Gallery label affixed verso

1200mm x 800mm

Estimate $30,000 - $40,000

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter collection.

exhibited Hamish McKay gallery, 2000.

Estimate $12,000 - $18,000

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11 Peter Robinson

Black Zero Shift

hand cut acrylic, edition of 3 3480mm x 500mm x 470mm Estimate $7,000 - $9,000

Peter Robinson’s Black Zero Shift comprises nothing: 140 interlocking black zeroes of various shapes and sizes, from rotund gothic Os and thin bands to slender ellipses and wobbly 0s. Something is missing. In other work by Robinson, these zeroes are accompanied by ones to form impenetrable blocks of binary code; they form sets of different configurations of two mutually exclusive states: 1 and 0, on and off, black and white, light (Te Ao) and darkness (Te Po).

According to a variant of Maori mythology, Robinson’s multiple use of zeroes describes pure positivity. Used twice, the te reo negation ‘kore’ creates the double negative, ‘korekore’, which describes a realm that, by being a negation of itself, is both complete void and the pure positivity from which all things originate – in this realm, a supreme being named IO resides.

According to quantum mechanics, the binary oppositions of which Robinson’s works make use can be represented by a quantum superposition of both states: simultaneously something and nothing.

SIMON BOWERBANK

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12 Max Gimblett

Moby Dick - For Colin McCahon, Painter, Poet

acrylic polymer on linen, triptych signed © Max Gimblett, dated 1988 and inscribed “Moby Dick” and Acrylic Polymer in ink verso; inscribed “For Colin McCahon, Painter, Poet” in ink on left panel verso; © Max Gimblett, dated 1988 and inscribed “Moby Dick” verso; inscribed “For Colin McCahon, Painter, Poet” in ink on middle panel verso; signed © Max Gimblett, dated 1988 and inscribed “Moby Dick” and Acrylic Polymer “For Colin McCahon, Painter, Poet” in ink verso

764mm x 765mm each Estimate $20,000 - $30,000

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13

Dale Frank

Pensive worms keep me believing/ specialize in hard to qualify borrowers/ Thames Landscape

varnish and acrylic on canvas signed Dale Frank and dated 2004 in ink verso; Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso

2000mm x 1800mm Estimate $35,000 - $45,000

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14 Paul Dibble

God’s Own

cast bronze 1750mm x 920mm x 600mm Estimate $28,000 - $32,000

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15

Colin McCahon

Light Falling Through a Dark Landscape

charcoal on paper signed McCahon and dated Muriwai ‘71 in charcoal lower right; inscribed light falling through a dark landscape in charcoal lower edge

448mm x 598mm

REFERENCE Colin McCahon reference database number cm001322 Estimate $40,000 - $50,000

And the Lord said to him, Pass thou by the midst of the city, in the midst of Jerusalem, and mark thou Tau on the foreheads of men wailing and sorrowing on all [the] abominations that be done in the midst thereof.

– Ezekiel 9:4 WYC Painted in a studio on the west coast of Auckland, Light Falling through a Dark Landscape depicts the deep crevasse formed on Muriwai Beach by the space between Otakamiro Point and Motutara Island. McCahon renders this arrangement of earth with a single block of dark charcoal, split in two by a beam of light to create a horizontal bar resting on a central column of negative space.

McCahon’s two-year Necessary Protection series is made up of a large set of different iterations of this format. As if the subjects of an accelerated process of erosion and accretion, the fields of solid black charcoal vary in size, ratio and consistency in each work; the aperture between the two rocky masses contracts and expands, causing the inflection of the negative space in each painting to alternate between two forms – the capital I and the capital T. These two alphabetical motifs would occupy McCahon’s interest for the rest of his career.

For thousands of years, myriad cultures have venerated the T shape as a sacred symbol but, for McCahon, its JudaeoChristian identity as a Tau (or Tav) cross would have been most relevant. Amongst

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a host of other interpretations, as the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in Christian theology the Tau represents the fulfilment of the entire revealed Word of God and so a linking of the Old Testament with the New Testament. The I shape is at once a schematic representation of light, the Roman numeral for one and an abbreviated version of McCahon’s famous existential quantification: ‘I AM’. By way of the effortless manipulation of the delicate Muriwai coastline, Necessary Protection’s constantly oscillating alphabetical motif presents itself as an identifier both of the self and of an omnipresent, monotheistic entity.

Consideration of one of McCahon’s earlier paintings, I and Thou (1954–1955), presents the reading of an additional dichotomy and a self-affirming connection to the other: ‘Just as I am, Thou art’. As with all of the works in the Necessary Protection series, Light Falling through a Dark Landscape also presents a shifting visual relationship between the positive spaces of the land and the white Tau cross produced by the negative space between them; in McCahon’s paintings, the physicality of the land and its spiritual connection to those who subsist on it are inextricably linked. In McCahon’s Necessary Protection works, there is a strong sense of the transcendental and a clear suggestion that, whether religiously driven or not, all things are connected and reliant upon one another.

SIMON BOWERBANK

The shifting visual relationships depicted in McCahon’s two-year Necessary Protection series present the physicality of the land and its spiritual connection to those who subsist on it as being inextricably linked.

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A Young Love captures a very palpable sense of eroticism; composed from Hanly’s signature gestural lashings and pools of colour, the work’s execution speaks of the artist’s carnal sensitivities.

16

Pat Hanly

A Young Love enamel on board signed Hanly, dated 77 and inscribed A Young Love, Torso P in brushpoint lower right 550mm x 540mm Estimate $60,000 - $80,000

The Torso series, to which A Young Love belongs, is a body of work in which Pat Hanly has focused specifically on painting representations of the female form. For this series, the artist’s motivation was not to produce direct representations of a sitter’s likeness. Rather, as the images were created from impressions of past lovers retained in the artist’s mind, it was his intention to produce portraits that described the inner being and essential nature of his subjects. A Young Love captures a very palpable sense of eroticism; composed from Hanly’s signature gestural lashings and pools of colour, the work’s execution speaks of the artist’s carnal sensitivities. Despite the modest scale of the work, the body described within appears to burst forth from the confines of the frame and into the personal space of the viewer. This sense of connection with the sitter is heightened by the visceral application of paint, which invites the viewer to closely examine every one of the artist’s energetic flourishes.

A Young Love illustrates the influence of primitivism and fauvist abstraction on Hanly’s practice. The artist’s angular depiction of his sitter speaks to the impact of non-Western art on modern European painting of the early 20th century; whereas his fluid lines and bright vivid colours recall the arabesque works of Henri Matisse and create a visual hothouse of libidinous activity influenced by a female muse. By omitting defining characteristics from his description of the sitter, Hanly ensures that his audience’s account of her is framed by

his own personal experience. This work is as much an account of Hanly’s personal relationship with the subject as it is a portrait of another being; the lines of paint trailed across the work’s surface create a frenetic energy that speaks of the sexual activity and feeling of synergy that Hanly associated with the sitter. Hanly’s decision to present a distorted view of the subject, offering just the lower torso and legs, also alludes to the work L’Origine du Monde [The Origin of the World] by Gustave Courbet.

A Young Love, like the Torso series as a whole, exists both as a personal document referring to a particular moment in Hanly’s life – his impressions of the woman encountered – and as a lasting account of the process by which it was made. In this work, Hanly has captured the energy of artistic creation, and each mark, drip, splatter and stroke are a testament to his painterly methodology. The enigma of the painting’s anonymous subject – who is identified only by the letter ‘P’ inscribed in the lower left corner of the work – is echoed by the clear tension between spontaneous and deliberate actions that governed the artist’s approach.

The suggestive nature in which Hanly has delineated the letter ‘P’ fosters speculation; it draws the viewer to ponder the identity of the subject and the precise nature of her relationship with the artist. It is yet another invitation into a profound, yet highly personal perspective.

ALEKSANDRA PETROVIC

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McCahon was an expert amateur geomorphologist… But landscape was never merely landscape to McCahon, however deeply he understood the processes, especially erosion, by which it was formed. It was also an arena for exploring metaphysical and existential drama.

17

Colin McCahon

North Otago 7 PVA on board signed Colin McCahon, dated 1967 (June) and inscribed North Otago in brushpoint lower right; signed Colin McCahon, dated 1967 and inscribed North Otago 7, P.V.A. in brushpoint verso; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery loan and exhibition label, inscribed 47 affixed verso 900mm x 1020mm EXHIBITED Colin McCahon: North Otago Landscapes, Barry Lett Galleries, 24 October-3 November 1967.

REFERENCE Colin McCahon reference database number: cm000280 Estimate $250,000 - $350,000

In the mid-1960s, discouraged by the fairly negative reception of his wholly abstract Gate and Second Gate series (1961, 1962), Colin McCahon took a rare step backwards and decided on a return to landscape painting, describing the move to his friend, the poet John Caselberg, as: “A return to ‘realist’ painting but a realism impossible without the previous work” (6 March 1963).

One of the highlights of this ‘return to landscape’ phase is a large series of North Otago Landscapes, first shown at the Barry Lett Galleries in 1967.

McCahon had lived in North Otago briefly as a boy so his return visits to the area in the 1960s and ’70s – often to teach art courses at Kurow – were to a scene deeply familiar and, as it were, known by heart. As he wrote in his catalogue note to the 1967 exhibition: “In painting this landscape I am not trying to show any simple likeness to a specific place. These paintings are most certainly about my long love affair with North Otago as a unique and lonely place.”

Most of McCahon’s return visits were made in winter as is suggested by the chilly tonalities of green, black, white, grey and ochre which predominate as he depicts the winter landscape of sky, horizon, hill, gully, river and plain over and over again.

North Otago 7 is one of the larger works in the series and, while it bears a distinct familial likeness to the others, it also has some highly distinctive characteristics. All the North Otago works are painted with synthetic polymer paints on hardboard and, in this instance, the underlying board is clearly visible behind the rapidly brushed cream of the sky (effortlessly suggesting cloud formations) and the somewhat denser green of the hills; bare board is visible also along the brow of the plateau. This sketchy freedom gives

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a fresh and improvisational feeling to the whole work. The colouring is quite unusual in comparison to other works in the series. While a deep, wintry green is the predominant colour here, blacks and dark blues are also subtly utilised in suggesting the contours of hills and gullies, while the foreground plain is a dense yellow ochre.

McCahon was an expert amateur geomorphologist whose understanding of New Zealand landscapes was informed by his lifelong study of Charles Cotton’s classic book Geomorphology – McCahon was given a copy as a wedding present in 1942. The book’s analytical and descriptive line drawings also had an impact on his style of deliberate simplification, both early and late. In 1972, for instance, he completed a set of watercolours, closely related to the North Otago paintings, which carried the generic title: The North Otago Landscape as described by Professor CA Cotton and seen by Colin McCahon (1972).

But landscape was never merely landscape to McCahon, however deeply he understood the processes, especially erosion, by which it was formed. It was also an arena for exploring metaphysical and existential drama. He was presumably pointing to this dimension when he commented in the 1967 catalogue: “the real subject is buried in the works themselves”; though, as always, he declined to spell out precisely what he meant, presenting his viewers, after this hint, with the throwaway line: “perhaps they are just North Otago Landscapes”.

That seems perhaps especially true of this beautiful painting which is one of the most naturalistic and spontaneous of the whole great series. peter simpson

17

Colin McCahon

North Otago 7 PVA on board signed Colin McCahon, dated 1967 (June) and inscribed North Otago in brushpoint lower right; signed Colin McCahon, dated 1967 and inscribed North Otago 7, P.V.A. in brushpoint verso; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery loan and exhibition label, inscribed 47 affixed verso 900mm x 1020mm EXHIBITED Colin McCahon: North Otago Landscapes, Barry Lett Galleries, 24 October-3 November 1967.

REFERENCE Colin McCahon reference database number: cm000280 Estimate $250,000 - $350,000

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18

Bill Hammond

G.S.T. oil on canvas, triptych signed W.D Hammond, dated 1994 and inscribed Tea Towel in brushpoint lower edge, each 600mm x 400mm (each panel) PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Brooke Gifford Gallery, 1994.

On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 1998 – 2014 EXHIBITED Brooke Gifford Gallery, 1994.

A very peculiar practice: Aspects of recent New Zealand paintings, City Gallery, Wellington Te whare Toi, 1995.

The Helene Quilter and Tony Chamberlain Collection, GovettBrewster Art Gallery, 1998 ILLUSTRATED Smith, Allan, A very peculiar practice: Aspects of recent New Zealand paintings, City Gallery, Wellington Te whare Toi, 1995, p. 29 Estimate $30,000 - $40,000

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GST was made at a crucial point within the overall arc of Bill Hammond’s career. While avian-inspired forms had been creeping into Hammond’s practice since 1990, it was during the year prior to the one in which GST was produced that the artist made his first truly significant bird painting, Watching For Buller (1993)1. Further, in the same year that GST was painted, the artist produced the profoundly important Buller’s Table Cloth (1994)2 and, accordingly, the two works share remarkable technical similarities. Both paintings have monochromatic palettes; in each case, the artist has elected to use only carefully daubed black pigment on off-white found materials. It is in Hammond’s serene paintings of 1994 that he first mastered the deft approach to rendering gradient and describing form that was crucial to the success of his large-scale, magnum opus paintings of 1994–1996.

Hammond’s introduction of colonial narratives into his paintings in the 1990s was a watershed in the development of his career. Since the early 1980s, the artist’s maniacal cityscapes, landscapes and interiors had examined the taxonomic structures at the heart of industrialised

societies; however, in drawing on examples from 19th and early-20th-century New Zealand, the artist devised entirely new angles from which to examine the concepts of social, cultural and political capital.

The artist’s initial works of this ilk – such as Watching For Buller and Buller’s Table Cloth, which referenced ornithologist Sir Walter Buller’s (1838–1906) hunting of native bird species – were quite literal responses to historical events. Later works, however, amalgamated reference points from early New Zealand history with those from the present day in order to critique contemporary society; poignant examples include Placemakers 1 (2006) and Farmer’s Market (2008). To this end, GST is an advanced early example in which Hammond experiments with themes that would later become central to his practice.

Designed and executed in a tripartite format, GST sees Hammond reference European altarpieces of the European renaissance which were commonly completed in a triptych layout. The allusion to Christian iconography is made even more explicit by the artist’s cruciforminspired posing of the avian figure on the far-right panel. Hammond’s use of

this time-honoured and sacred format to host the well-known acronym for taxable goods and services is, in essence, a satirical response to the world around him. In crafting the letters from forms derived from the natural world, Hammond highlights that, throughout our nation’s societal development, native fauna has often shouldered the true cost of economic progress. In staging the painting’s content so that it is endowed with religious significance, Hammond references the rhetoric that sits at the heart of Christian belief: the darker side of human pursuit heralds a destructive outcome. GST is Hammond at both his simplest and his most poignant.

CHARLES NINOW Collection of Wallace Arts Trust. Purchased 1994.

Collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.

Purchased 1997.

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Constructed out of skin so flawless that it seems to have been buffed and polished, with a hairstyle comprising a solid block of completely compliant hair and with the doll-like stare of an empty shell, this painting reveals a mannered, self-consciously human artifice.

19 Peter Stichbury

Elizabeth Klarer

acrylic on linen signed P. Stichbury, dated 2013 and inscribed Elizabeth Klarer in brushpoint verso

605mm x 502mm Estimate $30,000 - $35,000

Irritatingly strange, yet very familiar, Peter Stichbury’s portraits are uncanny in the truest sense of the word. By combining features and parts of faces from a variety of different sources, such as newspaper and magazine clippings or images found on the internet, Stichbury creates incredibly odd and seductively beautiful amalgamations of human facial anatomy.

While Stichbury’s paintings are commonly named after real people, they never quite manage to accurately portray their namesakes; every so slightly they miss the mark. On close inspection of his paintings, it is clear that this discrepancy is not the result of any ineptitude on the part of their creator. Quite the contrary: these paintings are immaculately painted and very deliberately composed. Like airbrushed models, the subjects of Stichbury’s paintings are immaculate.

Paradoxically, each detail of Stichbury’s subjects is always perfect but somehow also completely incorrect.

Some of Stichbury’s other works have been named after celebrities, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Paris Hilton, but a large majority have been given the names of more esoteric individuals such as Zach Klein, the founder of Vimeo, or attributed to obscure characters such as Ella or Estelle. This particular painting is titled Elizabeth Klarer, after a South African woman who came to notoriety in the 1960s after claiming to have had a romantic relationship with an extraterrestrial.

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Klarer claimed that, following some sightings of a flying saucer in 1917 and 1937, she was invited on board a spacecraft in 1956 and transported to its mother ship. She later claimed that the occupant of the saucer, a perfectly handsome extraterrestrial from Alpha Centauri named Akon, impregnated her with a child that she subsequently gave birth to on his home planet of Meton.

Elizabeth Klarer is definitely not a portrait of a human. Klarer has a single, calculated blemish: a mole placed carefully on the side of her neck. Her pair of perfectly spherical, lustrous white eyes seems to have been lightly nudged apart, her ears give the impression of being a bit too large, her carefully manicured eyebrows spread nearly ear-to-ear across her brow and a shallow impression of a chin suggests a face deficient in the appropriate amount of form. Constructed out of skin so flawless that it seems to have been buffed and polished, with a hairstyle comprising a solid block of completely compliant hair and with the doll-like stare of an empty shell, this painting reveals a mannered, self-consciously human artifice. It is as if Akon has produced a facsimile of his soul mate, fresh from an assembly line on Meton, based solely on a passing understanding of what it means to be human.

SIMON BOWERBANK

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The Sailor Returns exchanges ‘Les Demoiselles’ dialogue about the European colonisation of Africa in the 19th century with a distinctly New Zealand discussion about the contemporary appropriation of traditional Maori imagery.

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Dick Frizzell

The Sailor Returns

oil on canvas signed Frizzell, dated 27/2/2007 and inscribed The Sailor Returns in brushpoint lower right

2445mm x 2335mm Estimate $70,000 - $90,000

Since leaving his job as a commercial illustrator in 1974, Dick Frizzell has steadily earned himself a reputation as one of New Zealand’s most voracious appropriators. Throughout his 40-year career, Frizzell has borrowed from a wide range of sources: his work has made use of New Zealand regionalist painting, mimicked artists such as Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, courted controversy with his adaptations of the hei-tiki and somehow managed to take ownership of the Four Square Man. However, with paintings such as Cubist Still Life with Hulk Comic/Lemon and Jug (1976) and Tiki with Chair Caning (1992), Frizzell’s perpetual migration between different styles and genres has been most commonly punctuated by sporadic returns to his cheeky take on Cubism.

It makes sense then that he would eventually tackle Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – the revolutionary masterpiece by Pablo Picasso that instigated the development of Cubism. Painted in 2007, exactly 100 years after Les Demoiselles was painted, and at exactly the same scale, Frizzell’s The Sailor Returns is a huge 2.4 by 2.3-metre, tonguein-cheek pastiche of one of the most important paintings of the 20th century.

A number of the studies Picasso made for Les Demoiselles included additional figures, one of which was a male sailor. However, in order to fix the attention of the depicted female figures squarely on the viewer, this additional character was not included in the final painting. As the title of Frizzell’s work suggests, clad in a fresh navy uniform and rendered in the style of a 1970s’ cartoon character, Picasso’s sailor has returned.

The presence of this male seems to have changed the demeanour of the women.

All dolled up, they have been transformed into sarong and bikini-clad babes in preparation for a customer; their previously confrontational gazes have been mitigated – swapped for a seductive nonchalance that nullifies any radical challenge that might have originally been issued to the viewer by Picasso’s Les Demoiselles.

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The heads of the two women on the right-hand side of Les Demoiselles were rendered by Picasso according to his interest in African masks. In The Sailor Returns, Frizzell has instead given one of these figures a hei-tiki for a head. By doing so, The Sailor Returns exchanges Les Demoiselles’ dialogue about the European colonisation of Africa in the 19th century with a distinctly New Zealand discussion about the contemporary appropriation of traditional Maori imagery. However, unlike Les Demoiselles, which contended that African artefacts should be taken as seriously as European art, Frizzell’s conflation of European art history with traditional Maori imagery challenges the very idea that either of these things necessarily needs to be treated with any reverence at all. With his characteristically irreverent sense of humour, Frizzell has appropriated Kiwiana, high art and culturally sensitive imagery in equal measure, affording none the security of a set position in New Zealand’s cultural landscape.

SIMON BOWERBANK

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Driver’s Relief paintings of the 1960s are notable because, rather than amalgamate foreign aesthetic principles with a regionalist outlook, they related directly to the output of their foreign (particularly, American) counterparts.

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Don Driver

Euclid

enamel and stainless steel on plywood construct signed Don Driver and inscribed “Euclid” and “Benson and Hedges Art Award 1968” in ink verso

1450mm x 1120mm

PROVENANCE From the collection of Kym Bonython, purchased 1968 EXHIBITED Benson & Hedges Art Award, 1968 Estimate $25,000 - $35,000

Don Driver’s Euclid belongs to a body of works that the artist made in the late 1960s, which are collectively referred to as the Relief paintings. Compared to the works of other artists, such as Ralph Hotere and Milan Mrkusich, who made ambitious minimalist paintings at around the same time, few truly exceptional instances of Driver’s Relief paintings have surfaced on the secondary market.

Accordingly, the public’s perception and knowledge of such works has essentially been shaped by the few that are held in public collections, such as Horizontal Relief (1973, Chartwell Collection) and Painted relief no.14: three blues (1972, Te Papa Tongarewa). In the year that it was painted, Euclid was entered into the well-respected Benson & Hedges Art Award (which the artist would win in 1972 with Painted Relief II), where it was purchased by Australian collector Kym Bonython, who held the work in his collection until his death. It is telling that Driver chose Euclid to represent his practice as, with its three-dimensional wooden surfaces, solid colour and unpainted planes of reflective stainless steel, the work encompasses the core concerns of his late-60s’ practice.

Much has been said of the effect that New Zealand’s distance from major international art centres has had on our nation’s aesthetic production.

Contemporary abstract painter Julian Dashper (1960–2009) once said: “The modernism that came into New Zealand had to travel a long way. It is only natural, given the way in which it was packaged, that it got damaged along the way” 1.

When one looks at our nation’s practice of 1950 to 1980, it is undeniable that the vantage from which outside influence was approached was of as much importance as was the source of influence itself. Driver’s Relief paintings of the 1960s are notable because, rather than amalgamate foreign aesthetic principles with a regionalist outlook, they related directly to the output of their foreign (particularly, American) counterparts. The artist travelled to the USA in 1965, allowing him to experience

mid-century American practice firsthand.

Driver’s use of industrial materials, reflective surfaces and vertically stacked compositional elements speaks to the practice of Donald Judd; whereas, especially in the case of Euclid, the artist’s use of linear imagery echoes the pictorial strategies employed by post-painterly abstractionists such as Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland. Referencing the ideals associated with non-objective art, the work’s title – Euclid – is taken from the name of the Greek mathematician ‘Euclid of Alexandria’, who is considered to be the ‘father of Geometry’.

Euclid’s significance, however, is not simply tied to the fact that it is stylistically of its time. Rather, this work, and the artist’s Relief paintings in general, are important because they share the same grand concerns as do the practices of Driver’s international counterparts. While New Zealand painters had been experimenting with formal abstraction since the late 1950s, Driver’s Relief paintings were a significant development in that they were not intended to have codified meanings that extended beyond the formal poetics of the raw materials themselves. In Driver’s own words: “I don’t like my paintings to be evocative, but to be something to be looked at for itself” 2. With a selection of materials that wouldn’t have looked out of place adorning the interior of a commercial building, Euclid invites the viewer to gaze upon the façade of a world driven by industrialised production. If the artist’s later works were ‘thrusts at our throwaway society’, as suggested by Michael Dunn 3,then the earlier Relief paintings surely elucidate upon the currency of manufactured materials in the modern world.

CHARLES NINOW Dashper, Julian. Untitled (Cultural Safety), This is not writing (Clouds and Michael Lett, 2010), pp. 56–57 Bell, Leonard. Don Driver: On the margins, Art New Zealand, Issue 18, 1981 3 Dunn, Michael. Don Driver: Recent sculpture, Art New Zealand, Winter, 1978, p. 18 1

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In Landscape, Northland, McCahon uses an approach to painting influenced by the aesthetic principles of New York expressionism to articulate the fundamental characteristics of his landscape.

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Colin McCahon

Landscape, Northland

ink on paper signed C McC, dated 1960 and inscribed Landscape, Northland in graphite and overwritten in ink lower left

550mm x 445mm

PROVENANCE Formerly in the collection of Rodney Kennedy Estimate $35,000 - $45,000

In 1958, McCahon’s position as deputy director of Auckland Art Gallery afforded him the opportunity to take a four-month research trip to the United States in order to gain firsthand experience of American museum practice and procedure. Aside from a trip to the 1984 Bienniale of Sydney (in which he presented the exhibition I Will Need Words) three years before his death, the American sabbatical was the only international travel that McCahon would ever undertake. While one imagines that its true significance wasn’t widely recognised at the time, the four-month sojourn is now celebrated as a pivotal event that would forever alter the way in which painting was practised in New Zealand.

It was during this trip that the output of the emerging New York School of abstraction expressionists first had a true impact on the 39-year-old McCahon.

Sighting paintings by artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in person allowed McCahon to engage with tenets of their practices that weren’t immediately apparent in reproduction. Following his return from the United States, the aesthetic principles extolled by their work would became major influences on the artist. With mid-century abstract expressionism in McCahon’s recent memory, the paintings that he would make in the late 1950s and early 1960s would place a greater emphasis on the act of painting; the manner in which he laid down paint became as important as was the subject matter that he chose to depict.

Landscape, Northland is built upon the approach to figuration that the artist developed in the early 1950s with his paintings of the North Canterbury region, whereby the folds and crevasses of the

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landscape were portrayed as a rhythmic grid of painted lines. While the work still bears the influence of Cubism, it is a significant departure from those that McCahon made prior to the ‘American experience’ of 1958 (for instance, his thickset, angular depictions of kauri forests). Summarising the words of the artist, McCahon biographer Gordon H Brown attributes the artist’s shift away from the density of his immediate environment to the “implications of hugeness encountered in American cities – taller by far than kauri trees” and, to a lesser extent, the “vastness” of its wide open spaces 1. The artist was still based in Titirangi when Landscape, Northland was painted and thus its subject matter was recalled from memory to complement his new “broader style” 2.

In Landscape, Northland, McCahon uses an approach to painting influenced by the aesthetic principles of New York expressionism to articulate the fundamental characteristics he remembered of the Northland landscape.

The work is the product of an artist with a newfound understanding of the gravity and implication of the human gesture and, with incidental markings forming a crucial element of its vernacular, it clearly evidences the process by which it was created. Landscape, Northland’s overlapping washes of ink speak to the path of the artist’s hand as much as they describe the serene planes of the Northland landscape.

CHARLES NINOW Brown, Gordon H. Colin McCahon: Artist, New Edition (Reed, 1993), p.95 Ibid.

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A four-month visit to the United States in 1958 brought about many dramatic changes in Colin McCahon’s practice… Possibly the most radical outcome of these changes is the great Elias series of 1959, to which this exquisite painting – the only one actually entitled Elias – belongs.

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Colin McCahon

Elias

enamel on board signed McCahon and dated 8 ‘59 in brushpoint lower edge and inscribed Elias, can he save him, will Elias save him in brushpoint

660mm x 430mm

PROVENANCE From the collection of the late Doris Lusk EXHIBITED Paintings by Colin McCahon, November 1958 - August 1959, Gallery 91, Christchurch, 1959 REFERENCE Colin McCahon reference database number cm000403 Estimate $250,000 - $300,000

A four-month visit to the United States in 1958 brought about many dramatic changes in Colin McCahon’s practice as he assimilated all he had seen: changes in size and format (much bigger and working in series), changes in materials (unstretched canvas and hardboard supports, commercial house paints like Butex and Solpah), changes in methods of paint application (more gestural and expressionistic), new subject matter (Northland landscapes, numerals, abstracts), etc. Possibly the most radical outcome of these changes is the great Elias series of 1959, to which this exquisite painting – the only one actually entitled Elias – belongs.

Of the 13 Elias paintings, all but two are painted with enamel house paints (Solpah and Butex) on hardboard. Except for Elias Triptych and You Are Witnesses, they all reference the same biblical verses in St Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 27, 46–49: And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying Eli Eli lama sabachthani.

That is to say, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calls for Elias… The rest said, Let be, let be, let us see whether Elias will come to save him.

McCahon had earlier made a painting based on this biblical moment using the slightly different words of St Mark’s Gospel.

This was Crucifixion According to St Mark (1947), in which the drama is depicted figuratively and words are placed in speech bubbles issuing from the characters’ mouths. But in the Elias series, the figures disappear and the paintings are made from the biblical phrases alone – or the many variations on them that McCahon

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devised – and from abstract shapes and colours, though some examples, as here, allude to landscape features such as sky and earth. These were not McCahon’s first ‘word’ paintings – they were preceded by paintings such as I Am (1954) – but were the first to use words to depict the drama of the Crucifixion.

It is possible that, in using words and abstraction in this expressionist manner, McCahon was influenced by a notable series, Je t’aime, painted by the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell just prior to McCahon’s visit to America.

Formally, this Elias is constructed of three horizontal bands. The top band, whose blues and whites suggest sky, is dominated by the word ‘Elias’ running side to side and heavily underlined. The middle band contains the words: can he save him / will Elias save HIM; the first phrase is in brown, the second in white against a dark background. The repetition introduces the element of doubt, which was crucial to the series. (“I became interested in men’s doubts,” McCahon wrote.) The lowest band is dark red with pale, cut-off corners, and an unusual curving line (unique in the series and of oblique significance) running from the centre to the bottom-right corner.

Elias is formally tight and visually striking.

This brilliant painting is from the collection of McCahon’s close friend and colleague Doris Lusk, who spoke at the opening of his great Recent Paintings exhibition at Gallery 91 in Christchurch in October 1959 where the Elias paintings, and McCahon’s other post-U.S. works, were first shown. It stayed in her collection until her death.

PETER SIMPSON

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Marti Friedlander Doris Lusk 1978 , (pictured before Elias and other works from her personal collection). Collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki.

Reproduced courtesy of Auckland Art Gallery and the artist.

Photograph by Grant Banbury, Doris Lusk’s Studio/Home, April 1990, handmade book, edition of two.

Drawing from the stark compositions of Ed Ruscha, as well as the skyscapes depicted in colonial paintings from the 19th century, Cotton creates a narrative composed of interwoven meanings, exploring questions around spirituality, and its connection to the land and all who inhabit it.

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Shane Cotton

Broken Prayer

acrylic on canvas signed Shane Cotton, dated 2010 and inscribed ‘BROKEN PRAYER’ in ink verso

1400mm x 1400mm

exhibited Recent Painting, Michael Lett, Auckland, 30 June - 31 July 2010

Estimate $55,000 - $75,000

Broken Prayer is a painting with a cinematic quality. The work assembles a brooding tempestuous sky, floating letters, seemingly whispered by the wind, and Cotton’s falling birds – a signature motif from his late career – into a multifaceted tableau that envelops the viewer in a rich, contemplative experience. Drawing from the stark compositions of Ed Ruscha, the skyscapes depicted in colonial paintings from the 19th century as well as typography comprising Gothic script and serif fonts, Cotton pulls together a myriad of cultural and art historical references to form a dialogue about the spiritual identity of the tangata whenua and the innate connection of these indigenous peoples to their ancestral land.

The early 2000s witnessed a shift in Cotton’s working methodology, which saw him incorporate the use of an airbrush into his practice in an effort to create imagery in which sleight of hand is incorporated into the artistic process. In Broken Prayer, the artist’s use of the technique is masterful. By assembling an airbrushed te reo translation of The Lord’s Prayer into a disjointed, staccato composition that, in places, delicately dissolves amongst the ominous clouds, the artist has denied the viewer’s ability to achieve a coherent reading. Cotton’s obfuscation of the text is intended to hamper a literal interpretation of the work, thereby presenting the viewer with an image that, at first glance, appears to be an illegible web of floating symbols.

Painted in a hue that connotes violence, the falling bird in the foreground echoes

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the sentiment that informed the artist’s application of text. Battered by invisible, yet external forces, its shape is distorted almost beyond recognition. In a similar manner to that of his contemporary, Bill Hammond, Cotton employs the image of a bird as a symbol referring to New Zealand’s nationhood and acknowledges the violence done to the native flora, fauna and human population in our nation’s past. The bird could also be interpreted in a number of different ways: as a ghost, a soul falling to the underworld, as a symbol of the loss of spirituality through the conversion of Maori to Christianity, and as an allegory of the ongoing challenges facing tangata whenua in a post-colonial society.

Cotton’s practice has frequently explored narratives associated with biculturalism in New Zealand and the politics that have, since James Cook’s discovery of Aotearoa in 1769, shaped our national identity. This tendency began with the artist’s celebrated sepia-toned Genealogy paintings of the early 1990s and has developed into a line of inquiry that has not only remained consistent, but continues to be refined.

Broken Prayer’s richly layered, text-laden composition is redolent of aspects of Colin McCahon’s practice. Most notably, the work traces themes that permeate the seminal Practical Religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha (1969), which speaks to the fragility of existence and the precarious relationships between human life and its surroundings.

ALEKSANDRA PETROVIC

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25 Max Gimblett

One Stroke Bone, For Anthony Fodero

synthetic polymer paint on canvas signed ©Max Gimblett, dated 2002 and inscribed One Stroke Bone, For Anthony Fodero in ink verso

2040mm diameter Estimate $70,000 - $90,000

Max Gimblett’s approach to painting is directly informed by his identity as a practising Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk: as with Zen Buddhist ink painting, Gimblett’s production of the Zen circle or ‘enso’ is essential to the large majority of his work.

Aside from a few exceptions, such as those created by the Zen master Bankei Yotaku, most enso are created by a single continuous gesture produced while the artist is in a mental state known as ‘mushin no shin’ or ‘the mind without mind’. While in this state, practitioners act intuitively, free from the burden of discursive thought.

In an attempt to achieve mushin, Gimblett has trained himself not to second-guess his initial decisions. Of his painting process, Gimblett states: “When I’m doing an ink drawing, if it says in my mind: ‘Throw the ink’, I throw the ink. To not throw the ink is to be dishonest.”

There are clear parallels between this Buddhist-inspired process and those of the action painters of the mid-20th century such as Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock.

However, unlike the practices of Gimblett’s antecedents, the ancient tradition of enso painting in which he participates has a very specific intended output. According to Zen Buddhist teaching, each enso represents everything that was necessary in order for it to come into existence. Each enso is unique and, like its creator, visibly imperfect; each is indexical of a particular moment in time and, as such, instantiates a particular arrangement of the contents of the universe.

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Gimblett’s creation of an enso painting such as One Stroke Bone, For Anthony Fodero begins with a ritual. Two buckets, one filled with water, the other with black acrylic paint, are placed on the floor next to a huge, doughnut-shaped stretched canvas. Wielding a large mop with two hands as a samurai might hold a katana, Gimblett positions himself next to the canvas, staring at it. He then spends a few silent moments repeatedly dunking the mop head into the bucket of water, lifting it out and waiting for the water to drain, then placing it back into the bucket. The same process is repeated with the bucket of black paint: Gimblett submerges the mop head into the paint, lifts it out and carefully waits for the paint to drain into the bucket, then places it back. Once the ritual is complete, like an athlete seconds before the flawless execution of a dive or a jump, Gimblett stands to the side of the canvas and begins mentally preparing himself.

After a long period of meditation, with a loud battle cry, he strikes the canvas with the mop, expelling his prepared energy in a single, focused, circular movement, which lasts only a few seconds.

SIMON BOWERBANK

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The simple and beautiful image expressed in Jump E17 is of the fledgling gannets flying for the first time. The work invites the viewer to meditate on, and engage with, the questions of life: what it is to live and take risks, to plunge into the unknown.

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Colin McCahon

Jump E17

oil on canvas signed CMcC and dated ‘74 in brushpoint lower left and inscribed (E17) in brushpoint lower right

900mm x 560mm

PROVENANCE Purchased by the present owner in c.1989 from Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington EXHIBITED Jumps and Comets: Related events in my world Colin McCahon, Barry Lett Galleries, 7 May - 7 June 1974. Works in Stock, Barry Lett Galleries, 4 - 15 November 1974 Reference Colin McCahon reference database number: cm000509 Estimate $190,000 - $250,000

In its raw abstracted brilliance, Colin McCahon’s Jump E17 invites the viewer to meditate on, and engage with, the questions of life: what it is to live and take risks, to plunge into the unknown. In 1973, the return of the gannets to their Muriwai nesting colony provided McCahon with the inspiration for the Jump series. The simple and beautiful image expressed in Jump E17 is of the fledgeling gannets flying for the first time. Invoking the form of the island’s cliff face to frame the right-hand side of the picture plane, the completed work is a striking, bold composition that engages the viewer in a deep philosophical and metaphysical reflection. The Jump series builds upon the developments of McCahon’s earlier Necessary Protection series (1971 and 1972), in which he first depicted the Muriwai coastline as concrete, geometric form.

The reduced forms and flat picture plane of the work shape a palpably tense, bold and confronting tableau; one whose pithy title presents the viewer with a directive, a call to action: ‘Jump’. However, the painting is more than a simple invocation to follow the actions of the gannets and carpe diem. McCahon viewed his practice as a continuation and advancement of the broader tradition of conveying Christian themes in visual art that dates back to the Middle Ages. As with many of McCahon’s other works, Jump E17 assesses the relevance, function and plausibility of religious belief. In illustrating the gannets’ right of passage, McCahon’s intention was to allegorise his awareness that religious belief was, in and of itself, an ‘act of faith’.

Beyond simply a tracing of the physical trajectory of the gannets’ jump, the dotted line, which diagonally divides the painting, carries with it a poignant set of deeper

meanings. On one hand, it could be said to be a metaphor for the soul’s journey from earth to heaven. Alternatively, however, it could be read as a reflection of the role that Christianity played in McCahon’s own life, in that it had the power to both deflate and uplift the spirit.

Whilst McCahon frequently created religiously inspired narratives to convey these reflections and spiritual sentiments, in the case of the present work this has been more subtly expressed through the manipulation of form and colour; a uniquely New Zealand take on the tradition of abstract expressionism. The division between the upper section of the composition and the earthly realms of the landscape, for example, recalls the implied dichotomy between heaven and earth present in Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. McCahon’s use of right-angled geometric form and sharp distinctions between binary colours, on the other hand, speak of McCahon’s awareness and sound understanding of European formalism. In Jump E17, the artist employs reductivism in a manner that reframes traditions such as De Stijl, constructivism and suprematism in the context of the New Zealand landscape. McCahon’s earlier Here I Give Thanks to Mondrian (1961) is another example of how this European awareness underpinned his work; it was an awareness which also prompted him to engage and grapple with the ‘problem’ of contemporary art, abstraction and the fact that, in McCahon’s own words, ‘Mondrian, it seemed to me, came up in this century as a great barrier – the painting to END all painting’.

RACHEL KLEINSMAN

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27 Grahame Sydney

‘Sunset Near Omarama’

oil on canvas signed Grahame Sydney and dated 1994 in brushpoint lower left; signed Grahame Sydney, dated 1994 and inscribed © ‘Sunset Near Omarama’ in ink verso 700mm x 1105mm

Estimate $100,000 - $150,000

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With an absence of population, or any sign of industry or development, ‘Sunset Near Omarama’ describes the raw, essential character of the Otago landscape.

Painted in 1994, Grahame Sydney’s ‘Sunset Near Omarama’ greets the viewer with a crepuscular landscape that is characterised overall by a spectacular stillness. As with the best of Sydney’s paintings, ‘Sunset Near Omarama’ is completed with a high degree of polish and a virtuoso handling of paint to produce a photographic veracity that belies any presence of the artist or his brush.

In terms of composition, ‘Sunset Near Omarama’ is minimal and features only a thin, linear slice of land that stretches across the lower third of the painting, leaving the majority of the pictorial space to the chromatic subtleties of sky. That Sydney is able to create a powerful and arresting image in the absence of traditional subject matter is testament to his painterly talent. In this regard, ‘Sunset Near Omarama’ functions as an exercise in the painter’s ability to capture and translate the ostensibly transient quality of the atmosphere at sunset into the pictorial realm wherein the light is seen edging up slowly from behind the shadowed landscape and dispelling the night.

The austerity of the piece and the complete lack of any indication of human presence lend the work an eerie yet beguiling quality. This absence of population, of any sign of industry or development, permits the work a high level of tranquillity which is then reinforced by the monumental stillness of the scene, appearing as it does to be without even a breath of wind. Simultaneously, the dearth of defining landmarks or recognisable features offers an element of anonymity, of indeterminacy and artistic imagination, which Sydney then counteracts by definitively naming the site and thereby anchoring it to a sense of place and consolidating a specific identity. The use of cropped edges gives the impression that only a small snapshot of a larger reality is being shown and that the landscape continues in its paired existence and extends well beyond the parameters of the physical canvas.

Extending the vein of immaculate serenity, the body of grass that lies in the foreground of the work is pristine and unsullied with not a single blemish marring its surface. Sydney’s decision to transcribe a relatively empty segment of landscape onto the linen canvas allows the viewer the luxury of being able to move through an impressively nuanced array of mauve and refulgent blue hues. Despite the perfection of the scene, the painting steers clear of the saccharine by avoiding any obvious aspects of the picturesque and also by the quality of the light, which bestows an aura of poignant and elegiac poeticism to the work. What Sydney offers to the spectator is a clean, crisp and seemingly objective representation of an untouched rural idyll.

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Soundtrack was painted in 1993, the same year that Hammond created the Waiting for Buller series: the group of works that would instigate the transformation of his land-based humanoids into mythological avian creatures. Soundtrack represents – and even seems to illustrate – an important transition point between these two stages of their evolution.

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Bill Hammond

Soundtrack

acrylic on four canvas panels signed W. D. Hammond, dated 1993 in brushpoint lower edge of top right panel; inscribed Soundtrack in brushpoint lower edge of top left panel

1200mm x 800mm Estimate $50,000 - $70,000

From the grotesquely contorted singing forms painted in the mid-’80s to the graceful cello-wielding bird-people of his later work, the figures that populate Bill Hammond’s paintings have always had a relationship with music. Soundtrack was painted in 1993, the same year that Hammond created the Waiting for Buller series: the group of works that would instigate the transformation of his landbased humanoids into mythological avian creatures. Soundtrack represents – and even seems to illustrate – an important transition point between these two stages of their evolution.

Onto this hinged tetraptych, Hammond has rendered a mustard-yellow limbo: a place of pure chaos inside which, as if powered by music itself, a metamorphosis is taking place. In the top-left panel, an elongated Frankenstein conducts a therianthropic cacophony. Leering over a pit of metal instruments, the creature fiddles with a tiny hammer and gong, causing it to emanate jagged waves of orders to an orchestra of bestial creatures in various states of transfiguration. To its right, a lunging lead singer with an obsidian flattop supervises a glass tank containing a miniature mountain and some sort of mermaid-ghost. Behind them, a dozen or so Edvard Munch-inspired scream-heads peer in horror through a temporary portal.

Dotted throughout the painting’s four canvases, an audience of vacuous infrared human forms stands aimlessly as if waiting to be processed.

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The live room of a recording studio houses an inverted centaur vocalist who leans coolly against a wall while smoking a cigarette; a mostly human body rests one leg on a table and plays an acoustic guitar in the midst of a convulsion-inducing metamorphosis; a dark horse quietly practises the saxophone in a corner. The distorted head of a pianist traverses the division between two of the painting’s canvases to slur the white outline of a cherub into a row of microphones, while his tuxedo independently pipes hieroglyphics out of a keyboard to the edge of the canvas. Nearby, the bottom half of his colleague accompanies him by wildly bashing a drum kit with a pair of hammers as his top half stretches across the room grinning senselessly at nothing.

In a pitch-black control room, an agitated sound engineer wrestles with the noise captured by numerous microphones. A pool of seaweed-green slime seeps in from the edge of the canvas; from an open window, a limousine can be seen parked outside.

Soundtrack is a ludicrously absurd painting characteristic of Hammond’s early narratives; it is a frenzied, flat depiction of a ruckus that demonstrates early-surreal Hammond at his very best.

SIMON BOWERBANK

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29

Ralph Hotere

Love Poem acrylic and dye on unstretched canvas signed Hotere, dated 76 Port Chalmers and inscribed Poems Bill Manhire Music Barry Morgan Jack Body Dance John Casserly Char Hummel in brushpoint lower edge and inscribed LOVE POEM in brushpoint upper left 3300mm x 880mm inscribed There is no question of choice but it takes a long time.

Love’s vacancies the eye & cavity, track back to embraces where the spine bends & quietens like some in the earth.

Your tongue, touching on song darkens all songs. Your touch is almost a signature. provenance Acquired by the present owner from Bosshard Galleries in 1976 exhibited Hotere - Out the Black Window, City Gallery, Wellington, 1997 This work was loaned for the grand opening of the newly renovated premises of the New Zealand Embassy, Washington D.C. in 1980, where it was exhibited for several months illustrated Baker, Kriselle and Vincent O’Sullivan.

Hotere, Ron Sang Publications, 2008, p. 140. ; O’Brien, Gregory. Hotere: Out the Black Window, Ralph Hotere’s work with New Zealand Poems, Auckland: Godwit Publishing Ltd, 1997, p. 63 note This work is accompanied by the custom made travel crate, used to transport the work for the exhibition, Hotere - Out the Black Window in 1997

Estimate $190,000 - $250,000

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Ralph Hotere’s Song Cycle paintings were conceived originally as a stage design for Sound Movement Theatre’s Song Cycle performance 1; however, as the artist’s concept for production changed, the loose-hanging banners developed into an independent series of paintings that are now widely regarded as one of the artist’s most important bodies of work.

The paintings were exhibited in 1976: first at Auckland’s Barry Lett Galleries in June and then later at Dunedin’s Bosshard Galleries (it was from this exhibition that Love Poem was purchased). In his review of the exhibition in Art New Zealand, Rodney Wilson described the installation of banners as “like lines of giant forest trees enclosing one as eye and mind feasted upon both visual and literary imagery”2.

These exhibitions were the first of the expansive installations – such as Godwit/ Kuaka (1977), originally conceived as a mural for Auckland Airport 3, Black Phoenix (1984–1988)4 and the collaborations with Bill Culbert (made throughout the 1990s) – that would form an important part of Hotere’s oeuvre.

Each work in the Song Cycle series is based upon a poem by Bill Manhire and, as a whole, the poems that were selected conjure tactile, sensual imagery and refer to reciprocity between independent beings. In Love Poem, the central narrative is a recollection of physical interaction between two lovers and the text refers to physical sensations (bending spines and lover’s tongue) and uses carnal words like embrace and touch. Hotere’s use of Manhire’s poetry is motivated not just by a personal affinity with the verse but also by the intent that, in each case, the text should mirror the methodology that informed the work’s making. The works are a union of Hotere and Manhire’s individual practices and, like a personal moment between two lovers, the contribution of one author is not intended to be more important than that of the other.

The visual imagery employed in Love Poem is grounded in Ralph Hotere’s abstract painting practice of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Concerned with concrete imagery’s propensity to function in the same way as does musical notation, the works are nuanced compositions of linear geometric form and primary and secondary colour set against sonorous

black backgrounds. With its affronting physical proportions and strong vertical lines, Love Poem clearly espouses Hotere’s belief that non-objective imagery can have a tangible emotional effect and, as the tight controls exercised in his early practice were abandoned in favour of a more expressive approach, it could be said that the Song Cycle series advances the cause even further. In keeping with his new approach that favoured chance-markings, Hotere exposed the works to the elements (notably rain), for up to two weeks at a time.

The Song Cycle banners are modern in the truest sense; they explore the very nature of the materials with which they are made and invite the viewer to do the same.

Aside perhaps from the practice of Colin McCahon – with his Northland Panels (1958)5 – the degree to which Ralph Hotere explored the physicality of his materials in the Song Cycle series was unprecedented in New Zealand. Not only did he manipulate paint and canvas in unorthodox ways, he explored the notion of the aesthetic experience on a conceptual level. In generating image from text and text from image, Hotere broke down the distinction between the two methods of relaying information; he gave words a pictorial immediacy and treated painterly marks as literary devices. Born out of an interdisciplinary project, Love Poem is about the communicative potential of the creative act; it is a visual poem that addresses the connection between a work and its source of inspiration and the relationship between a painting and its audience.

CHARLES NINOW Sound Movement Theatre was a touring production that originated from Dunedin and consisted of two performances: Anatomy of Dance and Song Cycle. The performances were grounded in choreographed dance and the latter featured poetry by Bill Manhire and stage design by Ralph Hotere.

2 Wilson, Rodney. “Ralph Hotere’s Song Cycle Banners”, Art New Zealand, Issue 2, 1976, pp. 9–10.

3 Chartwell Collection, acquired 1997.

4 Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa, acquired 1988.

5 Collection of Te Papa Tongarewa, acquired 1978.

1

Born out of an interdisciplinary project, Love Poem is about the communicative potential of the creative act; it is a visual poem that addresses the connection between a work and its source of inspiration and the relationship between a painting and its audience.

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The works from the Te Henga series could be viewed as the artist’s opus to a beloved area, whose idiosyncratic landscape, created by volcanic activity and colonial settlement, possesses an inspirational beauty and sense of drama.

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Don Binney

Te Henga oil on canvas signed Don Binney, dated 1967 and inscribed Te Henga in brushpoint lower left 1060mm x 860mm

Estimate $95,000 - $125,000

The wild and weathered west coast of Auckland, and particularly that of Bethells Beach, has long since occupied pride of place in Don Binney’s oeuvre, appearing and reappearing throughout the years from a variety of vantage points. In Te Henga, Binney avoids portraying the vast beaches and sand dunes for which the area is renowned and which gave the area its name, instead turning his attention towards the delicate balance between a man-made shed, nestled between the dense trees, and its natural surroundings.

Binney’s interest in the environment, especially its native fauna, is clearly on display here.

The work’s painted surface has been applied with an adept hand; a finely nuanced network of pale, muted blues, charcoal greys and dusty whites evokes the individual nature of the landscape.

Featuring a hard-edged style with flat passages of paint and sharp, crystalline outlines, Te Henga is firmly located in the distinctively clear and harsh light of the South Pacific. The shed, which Binney has placed in the centre of the painting, is depicted in flat, even colour, providing a visual counterpoint to the dense textures of the surrounding trees, hills and foliage.

The sinuous lines surrounding flattened blocks of colour guide the viewer’s eye through the landscape of the painting, inviting close examination of every brush stroke. The ebony outlines of the landscape not only provide a very lucid clarity to Te Henga but also perform a cloisonnist function, serving to deify the landscape through the separation of colour.

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The works from the Te Henga series could be viewed as the artist’s opus to a beloved area. Binney had an enduring appreciation and an intricate knowledge of this idiosyncratic landscape created by volcanic activity and colonial settlement.

It is also of note that the area possesses networks of walking trails, which guide visitors to locations ideal for birdwatching, alluding to Binney’s iconic bird paintings of the 1960s. Te Henga, which was created during this period, is a result of the artist’s close examination of the landscape, evidenced through the careful refinement of forms, colours and lines combined with the elimination of superfluous details in order to create an idyllic, elegant tranquillity that is both inviting and aspirational. By employing a reductive approach in his representation, Binney exposes the essential beauty that draws generations of settlers to Te Henga and expounds the need to preserve this unique landscape for posterity. Te Henga is imbued with dual purposes: one is decorative, the other a vital documentation of a moment in time and place, captured by Binney in his inimitable style.

ALEKSANDRA PETROVIC

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31

L. Budd

Fig 1-12

gesso on vintage wallpaper, fibreglass and epoxy resin 1990/1993 2245mm x 3650mm (overall)

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay. On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 1998 – 2014 EXHIBITED Hamish McKay gallery.

A very peculiar practice: Aspects of recent New Zealand paintings, City Gallery, Wellington Te whare Toi, 1995.

The Helene Quilter and Tony Chamberlain Collection, GovettBrewster Art Gallery, 1998 ILLUSTRATED Smith, Allan, A very peculiar practice: Aspects of recent New Zealand paintings, City Gallery, Wellington Te whare Toi, 1995, p. 34 Estimate $25,000 - $35,000

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Fig 1–12 is a subtle political statement that urges its audience to look past the smooth veneers of the modern world and examine the seemingly innocuous boundaries that shape their everyday existence.

I have heard the forms Budd fashions qualified as minimalist with a quirky humanness. Minimalist they certainly are, if by minimalist we mean reduced, shorn of detail, formal accident or expressive incident. However, if with this term we are referring to a precise art-historical context… Budd’s art is not minimal.

– p. mule1 L. Budd, who is thought to have passed away during the year of 2005, was an artist who exhibited throughout New Zealand and internationally from the late 1980s. Along with a number of colleagues with whom the artist was thought to have worked closely – including Blanche Readymade, p. mule, Merit Gröting and Merilyn Tweedie – Budd was a member of the elusive et al collective which began producing exhibitions in 2000, won the prestigious Walters Prize in 2004 and represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2005. The output from the years in which the collective was active under the formal moniker ‘et al’ absolved the independent authorship of the group’s individual members; it was a core tenet of its collaborative practice that the contribution of one member was no more apparent than that of another. While Fig 1–12 has been attributed to Budd when previously exhibited and catalogued, inscriptions and labels on its reverse side suggest that, throughout its making, the work was, at various stages, also attributed to Popular Productions (an early-career moniker used by Merilyn Tweedie), Blanche Readymade and Merilyn Tweedie herself.

As such, Fig 1–12 is considered to be an

important example in which the collective contributed to a collaborative outcome.

In Fig 1–12, the central substrate is vintage wallpaper that has been backed with woven fibreglass sheeting, coated with epoxy resin and painted with gesso (a gypsum-based preparation used to prime canvas for painting). A number of different wallpapers have been used; ranging from fleur-de-lis-style patterns to tessellated Pollock-like paint splatters – in some instances, the patterns are visible while, in others, they are not. The application of the gesso and the resulting residual markings call to mind the practice of American minimalist Robert Ryman. In much the same way as is true in Ryman’s paintings, Fig 1–12 is an optical white-out except for very subtle shifts in contrast between similar colours. The act of ‘whiting-out’ content from found materials was central to L. Budd’s oeuvre and carried with it a specific set a philosophical connotations and concerns – the practice would later develop to include uniform painted coatings of other colours such as black, pink, green and various shades of grey.

Unlike most of Budd’s practice from the 1990s, the surface of Fig 1–12 does not carry any of the artist’s signature scrawls, leaving the viewer to consider the implications of the over-painting without any direction from the author.

Budd’s simultaneous use of other objects which are traditionally involved in the relay of information, such as projector screens, photocopies and billboards. Like these objects, the household furnishings in Budd’s practice are presented as didactic structures: as subtle methods of exerting societal influence and control.

The work’s title (Fig. 1–12) and simple method of hanging (each element is suspended from a single nail) stages the 12 strips of wallpaper in the same manner as specimens would hang for scientific examination. Further, the white over-painting mirrors the process of gentrification and adaptive reuse. To this end, Fig 1–12 is a subtle political statement that urges its audience to look past the smooth veneers of the modern world and examine the seemingly innocuous boundaries that shape its everyday existence. It is poignant that the artists who contributed to the work have chosen to make the extent of their authorship unknown (opting, instead, to hide behind the singular moniker ‘L. Budd’) as the strategy mirrors the manner in which realworld political rhetoric is disseminated.

CHARLES NINOW The Estate of L. Budd, Michael Lett & Ryan Moore (Eds.).

The Estate of L. Budd (Michael Lett Publishing, 2008), p.186

1

Many of the found materials that Budd incorporated into her work appear, at first reading, to be relatively benign. In addition to wallpaper, these included objects like magazine racks and awnings.

Their relevance, however, is explained by

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Bill Hammond

Flight Recorder

acrylic on six loose canvas panels signed W.D. Hammond, dated 1998 and inscribed Flight Recorder in brushpoint, each

1800mm x 2500mm (overall)

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Brooke Gifford.

On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 1998 – 2014 EXHIBITED Brooke Gifford gallery illustrated Hay, Jennifer. Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning, Christichurch: Christchurch Art Gallery, 2007, p.118 - 119 Estimate $120,000 - $160,000

The decade of the ’90s saw Hammond forge, distil and refine his vision of the country’s primordial past: a vision that is pictorially transcribed in Flight Recorder. Here, as with much of Hammond’s work, the saturnine and the beautiful collide.

By the late 1990s, a distinctly unique pictorial language made up of zoomorphic creatures had taken up a dominant role in the painting practice of Bill Hammond. The artist’s trip to the subantarctic Auckland Islands in 1989 has become something of folklore, for it was that journey that transformed Hammond’s artistic vision and catapulted him to the forefront of New Zealand art history. The decade of the ’90s saw Hammond forge, distil and refine his

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vision of the country’s primordial past: a vision that is pictorially transcribed in Flight Recorder.

True to the work’s title, the six unstretched pieces of canvas that make up Hammond’s Flight Recorder, from 1998, record a multiplicity of flight modes that encompass the natural, the man-made, the religious and the mythological. World War II-era light bombers and biplanes are seen alongside a host of different creatures

such as flying fish, bats and soaring eagles, and, taken from Greek mythology, the figure of Pegasus is presented with hooves delicately outstretched. The dark silhouette of a trumpet-blowing winged figure draws parallels to the Archangel Gabriel or Saint Michael, while a chalkboard displays and records the arrival times of several flights, the last of which has apparently been “delanded”.

Amongst it all, Hammond’s idiosyncratic

avian creatures walk, dance, huddle and fly. The pictorial and painterly language of Flight Recorder is uniquely, and instantly recognisably, Hammond. Employing a restricted palette, Hammond relies on his deft handling of paint and graphite to impart the work with a poetic narrative that is both metaphorical and historical.

Flight Recorder comprises six separate canvases, each branded with the title of the painting and, in some cases, with

other pieces of signifying text. The words inscribed on the two paintings of the midsections locate the painting in the early 20th century, for the planes are identified as the British-built Gloster Gladiator, a fighter that was used in the 1930s, and the Dornier Do 17, a German fast bomber, also used in the 1930s. Reference is made to consumer items that were popular at the time: the cork-tipped Capstan Navy Cut cigarettes and Griffin’s biscuits.

Stretching further back in time, another of the sections of the painting pays homage to the Victorian era of collecting by offering up a wooden drawer complete with eggs or bones, and topped with a stuffed ornithological specimen in a glass cloche.

Here, as with much of Hammond’s work, the saturnine and the beautiful collide, producing visual forms that challenge and stimulate the viewer.

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33 Allen Maddox Grid

oil on canvas Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso 970mm x 970mm Estimate $12,000 - $18,000

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34 Yvonne Todd Ruthlon

lightjet print, edition of 3 + 1 artist’s proof signed Yvonne Todd, dated 2005 and inscribed ‘Ruthlon’ in ink verso

390mm x 320mm Estimate $4,000 - $6,000 35 Richard Killeen Untitled

gouache on paper signed Killeen, dated 22.7.79 and inscribed 3190 in graphite lower right

560mm x 385mm Estimate $6,000 - $9,000

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Containing visual links to Pick’s practice of the 1990s - such as paper bags and floating domestic objects - this series of works succinctly summarises Séraphine Pick’s early-career oeuvre.

Like the millennial ‘selfie’, each portrait that comprises the Looking Like Someone Else series depicts a subject in the process of becoming something else, of attaining a mask, of transforming into someone else, of morphing into a false personality or of adopting another identity. Each subject is posed or staged; at times, facial expressions are visible, at other times, obscured. Directly engaging with the performative aspect of achieving a likeness, these works prefigure recent conventions of self-portraiture, whose ascension is intrinsically linked to the proliferation of smartphones. In a similar manner to that of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, which presents a moment in time of the female subject, each portrait functions as a comment on feminine archetypes, the vacillating nature of identity and the pre-existing structures of understanding regarding, what Sigmund Freud termed, the mechanics of perception.

surrealist figurative works created in recent years.

The Looking Like Someone Else series of works witnessed a methodological shift in Pick’s practice, while retaining the underlying explorations into memory and identity, and the creation of inner worlds. The relationships between the works when viewed together, emphasised by recurring formal elements, engage the viewer in building an interconnected narrative in order to comprehend the seemingly anonymous presentation of each subject. Pick’s experimentation with duplicity and evasion undermines any literal understanding, instead highlighting the interaction of the viewer in deciphering each aspect of the visual language employed.

The resulting other world occupied by the subjects of Looking Like Someone Else appears approachable, yet cryptic, and it is this duality between the familiar and the unknown that typifies Pick’s practice. The Looking Like Someone Else series of works combines the conceptual concerns already present in Pick’s practice, alongside her technical mastery of the medium, merging them into an important series of works, which engage the viewer in a dialogue about the nature of identity.

Resembling a line-up of characters derived from portraits of people familiar to the artist and self-portraits alongside found images, this series of works forms an integral part of Séraphine Pick’s oeuvre.

Visual links to Pick’s early practice of the 1990s are present in the work depicting a figure obscuring its face with a paper bag, whereas the portrait of the sitter with its eyes closed provides a prelude to the

Borrowing from the classical tradition of portraiture, Pick subverts each portrayal, choosing to direct her focus to the sensory and psychological associations employed in the creation of a likeness. In much the same way as does the Rorschach inkblot test, Pick uses concealment and exclusion of detail in order to activate the mind into perceiving things which may not be obvious on first view. By eliminating the identifying features of each sitter, Pick endows every portrait with an innate humanity through the sparse utilisation of visual information, which, in turn, begins to illustrate the emotional and psychological state of its creator through the depiction of the sitter. The oscillation between the portrait of the artist and portrait of the sitter is further obscured by the denotative titling of the series, Looking Like Someone Else, indicating the artist in the process of adopting personae, and of a deeper analysis of social identity theory. Further, by employing techniques of concealment, through the characteristic smoky haze and floating objects, Pick constructs a language of symbols that subvert traditional representations of the feminine, as well as speak to the semiotics surrounding femininity and its representation in art.

36 Seraphine Pick

37 Seraphine Pick

38 Seraphine Pick

Looking Like Someone Else

oil on canvas signed Pick and dated 97 in brushpoint lower right

400mm x 300mm

Looking Like Someone Else

oil on canvas signed S. Pick and dated 97 in brushpoint lower right

400mm x 300mm

Estimate $3,000 - $4,000

ALEKSANDRA PETROVIC

Looking Like Someone Else

oil on canvas signed S. Pick and dated 97 in brushpoint lower right

400mm x 300mm

Estimate $3,000 - $4,000

Estimate $3,000 - $4,000

39 Seraphine Pick

40 Seraphine Pick

41 Seraphine Pick

Looking Like Someone Else

oil on canvas signed Pick and dated 97 in brushpoint lower right

400mm x 300mm Estimate $3,000 - $4,000

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Looking Like Someone Else

oil on canvas signed S. Pick and dated 97 in brushpoint lower right

400mm x 300mm Estimate $3,000 - $4,000

Looking Like Someone Else

oil on canvas signed S. Pick and dated 97 in brushpoint lower right

400mm x 300mm Estimate $3,000 - $4,000

LOT 36-41

PROVENANCE

From the collection of Helene Quilter.

Acquired from Hamish McKay in 1997

EXHIBITED Hamish McKay gallery, 1997 illustrated Milburn, Felicity and Lara Strongman. Seraphine Pick, Christchurch; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, 2009

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42

Big Red X acrylic on shaped perspex, oil on canvas on board signed Hotere, dated 66, and inscribed brushpoint verso

1730mm x 1730mm (widest points) Estimate $40,000 - $60,000

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Don Driver

Pink and Red Relief

vinyl acrylic, aluminium, lacquer and stretched canvas in timber frame inscribed “Relief 1979” vinyl acrylic aluminium lacquer 59” x 72” in brushpoint verso

1820mm x 1500mm

EXHIBITED Relief 1974, New Vision Gallery, Auckland, 1974 Estimate $18,000 - $30,000

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44

Jeffrey Harris

Two Figures in a Landscape

oil on canvas c. 1987 1825mm x 3645mm

Estimate $40,000 - $60,000

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Two interwoven motifs are visible throughout the varied body of work undertaken by Jeffrey Harris since he started his career as an artist in 1970: landscapes and people. In an interview conducted in 1981, Harris described his frequent use of these motifs: “it’s never just the landscape. My landscapes are always populated. And it’s normally the people in it who give the picture meaning.” However, subsequent to a move to Melbourne

in 1986, the influence of Australian neo-expressionism caused Harris to reconsider the importance of his figures and initiate an ambitious series of large paintings, which, instead, focus on the bright, interwoven fields of colour that had previously been relegated to describing the landscape backgrounds of his paintings.

This work was completed during his time living in Melbourne, and Harris has given

the abstract and the figurative elements of Two Figures in a Landscape equal treatment: a woman, distorted to mirror the contours of a stream of grey behind her, floats above a man in the process of being submerged by encroaching patches of brushwork. Surrounding them, vaguely recognisable objects devolve into geometric shapes, melting into the background that supports them. The psychological space described by the

body of works to which Two Figures in a Landscape belongs seems to be jettisoning the figures that inhabit it, flushing them out of its system by way of an intense cocktail of vivid colours and wide, painterly abstract gestures.

SIMON BOWERBANK

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45 Philip Clairmont

46 Pat Hanly

Paul

enamel on board signed Hanly and dated 86 in brushpoint upper left; signed Hanly, dated 86 in graphite and inscribed “Hope + Fire� B in ink verso

425mm x 510mm

acrylic and ink on paper inscribed Paul in brushpoint upper right 1210mm x 800mm Estimate $12,000 - $18,000

Hope and Fire

Estimate $18,000 - $25,000

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47 Ralph Hotere

Window in Spain

ink and watercolour on paper signed Hotere and dated 78 in ink lower right edge

320mm x 240mm

EXHIBITED A Journey Home, Museum Te Manawa Toi, Whangarei, 7 October - 1 December 2002 Estimate $8,000 - $12,000

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Colin McCahon

Kaipara Flats - Written

watercolour on paper signed McCahon, dated 71 and inscribed Kaipara Flat Written in brushpoint lower left

765mm x 570mm

exhibited McCahon: Days and Nights; Helensville; Poems of Kaipara Flat; Kaipara Flat: Written; Necessary Protection, Dawson’s Gallery, Dunedin, 30 July-13 August 1971 Reference Colin McCahon reference database number: cm001428 Estimate $40,000 - $60,000

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49 Peter Robinson

The Queen is Dead Long Live the King!

oil stick and acrylic on paper signed Robinson in oil stick lower right and inscribed The Queen is Dead! Long Live the King! in oil stick lower edge

1270mm x 1220mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Peter McLeavey Gallery.

On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 1998 – 2014 EXHIBITED Peter McLeavey Gallery Estimate $15,000 - $20,000

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Robinson excels at creating works that dissect public discourse on the politics and sociology of identity. The Queen is Dead! Long Live the King! is a wry comment on New Zealand’s unique colonial history, the cultures that it has spawned and the issues of identity and belonging that surround it.

Robinson’s placement of a crown on a figure borrowed directly from the tekoteko – traditionally found on marae – speaks to the ongoing debate regarding New

Zealand’s relationship with the British monarchy. By proclaiming a king in place of a queen, Robinson sardonically questions shifting opinions and discourse between the generations relating to monarchy and gender relationships, but nevertheless presents a very assured, yet ambiguous statement in the eponymous text inscribed in oil stick in the lower part of the work.

ALEKSANDRA PETROVIC

50 Rohan Wealleans Untitled

acrylic and polystyrene on board 100mm x 600mm x 400mm

PROVENANCE Acquired by the present owner from Hamish McKay, 2008 Estimate $9,000 - $12,000

Rohan Wealleans was the winner of the Waikato Art Awards in 2003 and then of the 15th Annual Wallace Art Awards in 2006; subsequently, his monstrous, innuendoladen work has generated a number of successful exhibitions in galleries as prestigious as London’s Sadie Coles gallery, CFA Berlin and C24 Gallery in New York.

This metre-long untitled specimen – purchased from Hamish McKay Gallery in 2008 – is a prime example of Wealleans’ signature method of cultivating multiple layers of acrylic house paint, of assorted colours and consistencies, into large bulbous growths. These layers often propagate onto objects, covering chairs, sticks and other objects to transform them into seemingly shamanistic items of ambiguous, perhaps extraterrestrial, origin.

Across the surface of this work, fields of indentations – the results of a process by which Wealleans deftly farms the exterior of his painting-sculptures with a knife in order to produce material to use in other such works – reveal cross-sections of the inside of its multicoloured acrylic skin while striped chunks of paint, harvested from earlier sculptures, rudely extrude from orifices that lead to the work’s cavernous interior.

SIMON BOWERBANK

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51

Colin McCahon

Rosegarden VI

synthetic polymer paint on unstretched jute signed C. McC, dated 74 and inscribed ROSEGARDEN VI in brushpoint lower edge

930mm x 376mm

REFERENCE Colin McCahon reference database number: cm001427 Estimate $80,000 - $120,000

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Rosegarden VI is the final work in a series of six paintings, all vertical in format and executed on raw jute. This series belongs to that seminal period within Colin McCahon’s oeuvre during which, while he was living in Muriwai, his subject matter underwent a metaphysical evolution synthesising the artist’s own spirituality and connection to the land. Originally conceived at the time of his Muriwai-inspired and open ended Necessary Protection series, McCahon found a refuge from loss in the Rosegarden series. At the same time he was working on the Blind series and The Shining Cuckoo and preoccupied with a succession of recent bereavements of close colleagues and family, namely the poets R.A.K. Mason in 1971 and, James K. Baxter in 1972, his loyal supporter, Landfall editor and poet, Charles Brasch and most significantly his mother in 1973. While the Blind series and The Shining Cuckoo each possess a stylistic conciseness, this is not as evident in the Rosegarden series which displays as much difference as it does harmony in the manner in which imagery is used. More interestingly, the Rosegarden paintings can be considered amongst his most optimistic works even though they were produced at a time of sorrow. Set on the West Coast, the Rosegarden series saw McCahon connect again with the beach and its strong association to the traditional Maori spirit path Te Rerenga Wairua – the jumping-off point for departing souls. This, together with his Christian approach, enabled him to revisit “bits of a place I love and painted in memory of a friend who now- in spirit-

has walked this same beach. The intention is not realistic but an abstraction of the final walk up the beach. The Christian ‘walk’ and the Maori ‘walk’ have a lot in common”1.

Rosegarden VI is essentially a landscape that is to be read in a perpendicular manner from top to bottom, registering sky, sea and foreshore; it carries a motif of a downward loop or semi-circular line of dots which McCahon introduced specifically to this series. According to Gordon H. Brown, its meaning is related to the title on a superficial level. The rose garden is, in a religious sense, synonymous with rosary beads used by the devout when reciting prayers. It also references a string of Polynesian beads or flowers.

Brown recollects walking through the streets of Grey Lynn with the artist one evening and gazing into a house occupied by a Pacific Island family, witnessed a scene that made a strong impression on the pair. They encountered a small family shrine surrounded by neatly arranged family photographs either festooned by flowers or draped with rosary beads and illuminated with what seemed more than artificial light. There is another possible interpretation put forward by John Caselberg after he had corresponded with McCahon subsequent to viewing number V in the series. He asserts that “it describes suffering particularly by Polynesian people in Auckland. On a black canvas hangs a necklet of small roses or jewels: islands of light shining against almost unimaginable loss and pain.”

Rosegarden VI, in contrast to other works in this series employs a dark palette of rich green and blues suggestive of a nocturnal seascape. The earlier paintings of the series depict sand, sea and sky enveloped in light and the string of beads operates as a formal device occupying the top of the painting as an adornment outlining the sun. As the series progresses, the mood darkens and the sky grows overcast. This final painting, however, begins a reversal of the process with the darkness lifting and the line of the horizon and a ribbon of breaking surf becoming visible. The implications are clearer when the viewer becomes aware that the series title is derived from the contemporaneous song “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden�, which carried a subtext; that there needs to be reconciliation between unfounded expectations and that mutual understanding is imperative if there is to be any kind of future.

MARY-LOUISE BROWNE The artist is referring to J.K. Baxter, dead and lamented, in a letter to Peter McLeavey. Gordon H. Brown, Colin McCahon : Artist, Auckland, 1993, p.174

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Extending upon Ralph Hotere’s illustrious oeuvre of paintings that tackled social, environmental and political issues, the Polaris series responded to the destructive danger of the nuclear warheads.

52 Ralph Hotere Polaris

acrylic, burnished corrugated steel and steel nails in colonial villa sash window frame inscribed Polaris on aluminium panel upper edge; RKS Gallery lable affixed verso; Long Beach Museum of Art, California lable affixed verso

1040mm x 965mm Estimate $60,000 - $80,000

Much of the work that comprises Ralph Hotere’s extensive and illustrious oeuvre has been conceived and executed in response to social, environmental and political issues on both domestic and international scales. Painted in 1989, Polaris is one of a group of works belonging to a series of the same name, which Hotere completed in relation to the destructive danger of the nuclear warheads of Polaris missiles. First built and launched in 1960 during the Cold War, Polaris missiles continued to be carried as part of the nuclear armament of both the United States Navy and the British Royal Navy until the mid-1990s.

In the creation of Polaris, Hotere has employed a number of different materials, including iron, wood and paint, which are harmoniously melded together to realise an impressively powerful work. A rectangular section of corrugated iron is burnished with a blowtorch to spell out the title of the work, while also serving to create a linear pattern of marks, which are evocative of the distinct mushroom-cloud shape of a detonated nuclear bomb. Adding to the visual effect of the painted explosion are the rough, trawled areas of violet-pink

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paint that spray out from either side of the corrugated panel just below the lettering.

As well as serving a pictorial function, the areas of burnt iron are simultaneously aesthetic with a lustrous, iridescent finish.

Catching and refracting the light outside of the panel, these passages establish a visual communication with the outside world that complements the political content of the work.

The painted backdrop of Polaris is realised in vibrant red and raven black and is richly textured, bathing the central panel of corrugated iron in a whirl of brush strokes.

Against this hive of painterly activity, Hotere encloses the work in solid kauri, appropriating a demolition sash window frame to act as a framing devise for the painting. Having become something of a Hotere signature over the years, the use of the sash adds an element of the New Zealand vernacular to a work that is, for the most part, global in outlook. In doing so, Hotere succinctly connects the global to the local, bringing international issues into the New Zealand consciousness.

JEMMA FIELD

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53 Ralph Hotere

Black Painting No. 39

brolite enamel on board signed Hotere, dated 1969 and inscribed Black Painting No. 39 in brushpoint verso

900mm x 600mm Estimate $50,000 - $70,000

The centrally placed and meticulously painted circle floating amidst the pool of black brolite enamel in Black Painting No. 39, offers a metaphorical sanctuary with opportunities for exploration into spirituality, mysticism and mythology.

The placement of the circle within the composition serves an important purpose; the viewer is enticed to gaze deeper into the surface of the painting and spend time examining the work, in turn, transforming the act of looking into something more meditative. The glossy surface connects with the viewer through the presence of their reflection amidst the seemingly infinite blackness, establishing a relationship between the artwork and its surrounding environment.

The work registers the shifting light on its surface, recording the passage of time, as the reflected image seen in the work exists only for the duration of time during which the viewer sees it. Hotere’s refinement of the formalist elements and composition, enables direct engagement with the materiality of the work, as the subtle reflection cast by the presence of the viewer brings forth a figurative, albeit temporary, element to interact within the pre-existing composition.

Situated above two lines running parallel to the lower edge of the work, the circle could be viewed as the faint outline of a planetary orb engulfed in the dark against the night sky: possibly alluding to the transformative power of an eclipse.

The composition of Black Painting No. 39 could, additionally, be viewed as a reference to the landscape of Port Chalmers, presenting an opaque sky

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above a landscape blackened by night, as witnessed from the artist’s unique vantage point. Thus, the field of black is filled with potential. It is not oppressive, nor sorrowful, but optimistic and imbued with an intense spirituality, reminding the viewer that a dark night is a necessary prelude to a new dawn. The allusion to dawn is further heightened by the use of colour in the delicate lines and delineation of the circle. Hotere’s use of these colours further heightens the inherent spirituality of the work, thereby transforming the act of looking into a monastic act, as if waiting for the veil of blackness to be lifted and for the entirety of the surface to be consumed by these vibrant colours.

The circle functions not only as an important symbolic motif of unity, infinity and regeneration, but also as a potent symbol within Christianity and Maori mythology. Hotere returned to the circle in a number of works dating from the 1970s, tracing a thin boundary of the circle in fine, inimitable brush strokes, continuously exploring the symbolic possibilities of the symbol within a refined, almost austere, composition. Hotere’s works from this period draw reference from the Suprematist art movement, most notably the suprematist oeuvre of Kasimir Malevich. By stripping away the need for representation and the refinement of figurative elements, the geometrical abstraction underpinning the composition of Black Painting No. 39 draws the viewer into a contemplation of spirituality and its relationship to life.

ALEKSANDRA PETROVIC

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54 Ralph Hotere

White Drip II

lacquer and acrylic on corrugated iron with cast pewter mouldings signed Hotere, dated 3.12.03 and inscribed WHITE DRIP II STUDIO I BNZ PORT CHALMERS in brushpoint centre left

1845mm x 850mm

PROVENANCE From the collection of the late Sir Paul Holmes Estimate $70,000 - $90,000

Executed in 2003, White Drip II was created in response to the late broadcaster Sir Paul Holmes’ reference to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan as a “cheeky darkie”. The remark drew widespread outrage from the New Zealand public, spawning an invective commentary, which spread across emails, letters, interviews and newspaper editorials. However, a number of New Zealanders were inspired to publicly defend Holmes, thereby highlighting the continuing polemic that is New Zealand race relations. It was this heated moment of racial tension, social responsibility and public condemnation that the White Drip series answered.

The dynamic and demonstrative threedimensionality afforded by corrugated iron causes White Drip II to rhythmically lurch out to meet and confront the viewer in all its tactility of form. Pewter nails, accenting the work at regular intervals along the top and bottom of the iron sheet, precisely adorn Hotere’s dark creation, offering at once a visual anchor and a sense of utility which recalls the function of corrugated iron. In terms of palette choice, White Drip II responds directly to the chromatic dichotomy that had polarised the country.

Here, a flawless black ground hosts a central dividing line of opaque white paint.

Extending down the length of the panel, the white pigment finally wobbles and terminates in a flurried splatter that is overlaid with an evocative blood-red cross.

The echoes of racial polemics, sacrifice, bloodshed and transgression are carried through the use of cruciform nail heads that punctuate the top and bottom edges of the work. However, Hotere’s use of colour, form or the written word is never simple or one dimensional. In addition to being an indictment, the title is also a direct description of the white pigment that runs, dribbles and drips down the centre

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of the panel, while the palette choice is one that runs through the entirety of the artist’s oeuvre. In Hotere’s work, black, in particular, holds a myriad of meanings that span the metaphysical, the cosmic, the existential and the mythological.

Hotere’s awareness of broader European art-historical traditions and movements greatly influenced his work, giving his artistic existence a wonderfully rich contextualisation which allowed him – as the first Maori painter to have been written into a history of art – to develop a biculturally integrated approach to his work. However, despite the consciousness of European form and tradition which shaped Hotere’s artistic identity, it is important to understand that he did not adopt European techniques unreservedly but, rather, assumed an informed awareness through which his own unique approach and artistic language was able to thrive in a New Zealand context. To realise this, consider the eloquent and all-consuming black of the present work – this not only represents Hotere’s signature expression of minimalistic infinity, but also is an evocation and adoption of the formal fundamentals of Maori painting, the sobriety of his palette reflecting colours associated with traditional Maori art.

While White Drip II is firmly anchored in a specific moment of 2003, the types of material that Hotere employs link the work to his earlier protest pieces. Most specifically, it recalls the corrugated-iron works that made up the politically and environmentally charged series of the early 1980s: Aramoana and Baby Iron. Then, as in 2003, Hotere raised his brush to cast a poignant and powerful comment on the divisive issues that were gripping the country.

Jemma Field

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55

Colin McCahon

Manukau 2

watercolour on paper signed McCahon, dated Jan ‘54 and inscribed Manukau 2 in brushpoint lower left; Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso

540mm x 740mm

EXHIBITED The Group Show 54, Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery, Durham Street, 2 - 17 October 1954 REFERENCE Colin McCahon reference database number: cm000852 Estimate $45,000 - $65,000

This fine watercolour belongs to a numbered series of landscapes by Colin McCahon’s response to his new environment at French Bay on the Manukau Harbour. He had moved north to Auckland in May 1953 and was immediately struck by the wet climate and dramatic lighting compared with Canterbury. He recalled: “At this time the bush and the harbour were of prime importance as subjects... the November light was for that first year was a miracle. It remains an obsession and is still a miracle”.

Painted in watercolour and gouache on paper, Manukau 2 depicts the harbour and background hills to the left and bush to the right. Above a cloudy sky animates the scene and is reflected in the waters of the harbour.

Although it is easy to make out the landscape elements in naturalistic terms, McCahon’s painting has other concerns.

The artist shows a modernist interest in the formal structure of the imagery as evidenced in the division of the surface by a scaffolding of curved and straight lines.

These divisions have very little to do with nature and much to do with constructing a painting on a two-dimensional surface.

The lines animate the surface and refer us to it. They also help divide the surface into planes that are merged into one another by the technique of passage introduced into painting by Cézanne and the Analytic Cubists. In this technique an opening, allowing one form to be merged with another, facilitates the transition between them and allows foreground and background to be interlocked. Cubism, and especially the work of Georges Braque, was of interest to McCahon at this time.

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He was especially concerned with making the painting appear as something solid and permanent rather than ephemeral and illusory. He noted: “In nature there are no empty spaces, the air between houses is as real as the air inside houses and the houses themselves...” In this painting we can see this principle in action as the clouds and their reflections in the water are made as substantial as the hills and the foreshore.

A further aspect to note is the subdued palette restricted to mainly blue/grey and ochre tints. Rather than imitating local colours, McCahon creates an image of sky and water and the ochre of bush and foreshore. In doing so he was once more following the example of Braque and Picasso who found that a restricted palette enhanced the objecthood of their Cubist works and drew attention to their formalist nature. It is also possible to see in Manukau 2 the use of multiple viewpoints, for at times we seem to be looking at forms like the hills at eye level while the harbour and bush appear as if viewed from above.

This presentation had the advantage of freeing the artist from the constraints of conventional one-point perspective and allowing the element of time and movement to enter the work. All these ideas and more were to figure prominently in McCahon’s large paintings. Related works include the Toward Auckland paintings and the Kauri series. This is fine painting in its own right and one that is of great interest because it contains fertile ideas that McCahon was to follow up in his later series.

MICHAEL DUNN

McCahon once noted: “In nature there are no empty spaces, the air between houses is as real as the air inside houses and the houses themselves...� In this painting, we can see this principle in action as the clouds and their reflections in the water are made as substantial as the hills and the foreshore.

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56

L. Budd

Cause in Season for an Effect, Studies Fig. 1

acrylic and black charcoal on found venetian blind signed L. Budd, dated 1996 and inscribed Cause in Search for an Effect, Studies fig. 1, C.A.P incised lower edge

1330mm x 1220mm Estimate $18,000 - $25,000

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57 Allen Maddox

Untitled (yellow)

oil on canvas Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso 615mm x 615mm

Estimate $10,000 - $12,000 58 Marti Friedlander

Tony Fomison in front of his painting Omai in 1979

vintage gelatin silver print inscribed Marti Friedlander and Tony Fomison photograph ink in another hand on Temple Gallery label affixed verso

410mm x 390mm Estimate $4,000 - $6,000

CATALOGUE 384

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59

Don Driver

Orange Skin 69

tarpaulin, linen thread, cotton fabric, animal hide and acrylic mounted on vinyl cloth and plastic signed Don Driver, dated 1984 and inscribed “Orange Skin 69� in ink verso

1600mm x 1188mm Estimate $6,000 - $8,000

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60 Milan Mrkusich

61

Jae Hoon Lee

Chromatic Suite II, No 2

Space Tree

acrylic on paper Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso 325mm x 390mm

c-type photograph, edition of 8 590mm x 1660mm

Estimate $5,000 - $6,000

Estimate $8,000 - $10,000

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62 Garth Tapper

Black Gold

oil on canvas signed Garth Tapper and dated ‘87 in brushpoint lower right

1500mm x 2000mm

PROVENANCE Commissioned by the present owner in 1987 directly from the artist illustrated Cook, Jeanette (ed.). Garth Tapper: New Zealand Painter, Tapper Art: Auckland, 1992, p. 93 Estimate $70,000 - $90,000

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63 Martin Ball

Tim Finn

oil on canvas signed Martin Ball, dated ‘06 and inscribed ‘Tim Finn’ in ink verso; John Leech Gallery lable affixed verso

2105mm x 1500mm Estimate $15,000 - $20,000

CATALOGUE 384

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64 Tony de Lautour

Silent Command

acrylic on canvas inscribed Silent Command in brushpoint upper edge

1430mm x 2040mm Estimate $15,000 - $20,000

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65 Tony Fomison

O Le Fa’aluma (The Mad One #3)

oil on hessian on board signed Fomison, dated 1983 and inscribed Started 5.10.83 Tauranga “Ole Fa’aluma” (The Mad One #3) in graphite on label affixed verso

202mm x 250mm Estimate $15,000 - $25,000

CATALOGUE 384

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66 Alan Pearson

Huia Nymph

oil on card mounted on board signed A.P. and dated 1978 in brushpoint upper right

983mm x 750mm

illustrated Pearson, Alison. Alan Pearson: Expressionist Portraits, Auckland: Alexandra Stewart Press, 2010, p. 147 Estimate $25,000 - $35,000

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67 Seraphine Pick Careworn

oil on linen signed Seraphine Pick and dated 2006 in brushpoint lower right

1070mm x 970mm

EXHIBITED Seraphine Pick, Brooke Gifford Gallery, 28 November - 23 December 2006 Estimate $18,000 - $20,000

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68

Jae Hoon Lee

Residue

c-type photograph, edition of 8 2100mm x 1020mm Estimate $5,000 - $9,000

Jae Hoon Lee is a hoarder and prolific collector of digital images. Also a perpetual traveller, Lee has amassed an image bank that includes photographs taken in locations as disparate as Antarctica, South Korea and Mexico as well as a host of more mundane digital material such as the textures captured from a variety of leaves and the surfaces of different kinds of rocks. Using Photoshop, Lee skilfully constructs hand-stitched composites out of the material contained in this collection.

For Residue, Lee has collapsed and fused together clusters of masonry, steel frames and reinforced concrete in order to assemble the rough form of an Arcimboldo-like bust. Hairs of frayed rebar protrude from the space between massive cubes of this grey matter while pieces of gravity-defying dust and rubble coat the exterior of the form. Against an artificially rendered gradient sky, this gigantic anthropomorphic assemblage watches over an industrial site of some description, perhaps containing similarly animate combinations of waste.

SIMON BOWERBANK

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69

Hye Rim Lee

Mesh 2, The Birth of Toki

digital print on canvas 1000mm x 1000mm Estimate $9,000 - $12,000

CATALOGUE 384

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70

L. Budd

All that night

photocopy, acrylic, paper, framed perspex 1050mm x 1850mm (framed)

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay. On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth 1998 – 2014 EXHIBITED Hamish McKay gallery Estimate $5,000 - $7,000

71

Elizabeth Thomson

The Black and White XII

patina, casein and oil-based pigment on 12 bronze moths and gesso on board signed Elizabeth Thomson, dated 2005 and inscribed The Black and White XII in graphite verso

750mm x 1345mm x 100mm Estimate $12,000 - $16,000 72 Ronnie van Hout

That was Perfect

c-type photographic print 500mm x 610mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay

EXHIBITED Hamish McKay gallery Estimate $2,500 - $3,500

73 Ronnie van Hout

After Peryer

digital print 725mm x 860mm Estimate $2,000 - $3,000

CATALOGUE 384

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74 Geoff Thornley

Unnamed/Name #9

oil on canvas signed Thornley, dated 6. 97 and inscribed Unnamed/Name #9 in stenciled acrylic verso; Vavasour Godkin gallery label affixed verso

1650 x 1650mm Estimate $20,000 - $35,000

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75

L. Budd

Becoming Joan of Arc

found magazine clipping and acrylic in timber frame; found magazine clippings, acrylic, foam board, plastic tags and ink in timber frame, diptych 760mm x 630mm; 570mm x 480mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay. EXHIBITED Hamish McKay gallery Estimate $2,000 - $3,000

76

Fiona Pardington

Wahine Engarahi

C-type on metallic paper, edition 1/5 600mm x 400mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Suite Gallery Estimate $3,500 - $5,500

CATALOGUE 384

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77 Andrew McLeod Seascape

oil on canvas signed A. McLeod in brushpoint lower right

1800mm x 1800mm

EXHIBITED Peter McLeavey Gallery, 2009 Estimate $18,000 - $20,000

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78 Shane Cotton

Ahika Blue Dream

oil on canvas signed SC, dated 04, and inscribed AHIKA BLUE BREAM in brushpoint lower right; signed Shane H. Cotton, dated 2004 and inscribed AHIKA, BLUE DREAM in ink verso

305mm x 405mm Estimate $10,000 - $14,000

CATALOGUE 384

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79

Bill Hammond

And I’m in the Kitchen with the Tombstone Blues

acrylic on board signed W.D. Hammond, dated 1983 and inscribed And I’m in the Kitchen with the Tombstone Blues, Part II, B. Dylan in brushpoint lower right

570mm x 730mm Estimate $18,500 - $22,500 80

Bill Hammond

I’ll Put a Spell on You

acrylic on board signed W.D. Hammond, dated 1983 and inscribed I’ll Put a Spell on You, Manfred Mann in brushpoint lower edge

570mm x 785mm Estimate $18,500 - $22,500 81

Tony Fomison

Winter’s Walk

oil on canvas board signed Fomison, dated started 23.7.87 and inscribed “Winters Walk: her and the puppet” in graphite verso; signed Fomison, dated started 23.7.87 Grey Lynn and inscribed “Winters Walk: her and the puppet” in graphite on artist’s original label verso

480mm x 380mm Estimate $25,000 - $35,000

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82

Charles Blomfield

White Terraces, Rotomahana

oil on canvas signed C. Blomfield and dated 1886 in brushpoint lower left

420mm x 570mm Estimate $30,000 - $40,000

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83 Toss Woollaston

Horoirangi from Mapua

oil on paper 405mm x 480mm

PROVENANCE Note: There is an oil sketch on the reverse side of the painting depicting a young girl. The work is accompanied by original graphite sketch of the girl in the portrait Estimate $16,000 - $20,000

CATALOGUE 384

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84 Pat Hanly

Prelude to a Journey

oil on board, diptych signed Hanly and dated 77 on right panel in graphite verso; signed Hanly and dated 77 on left panel in graphite verso

2955mm x 1195mm (each panel); 2955mm x 2390mm (overall)

PROVENANCE Commissioned as part of a larger mural by Auckland Airport, 1977; uninstalled and gifted to the Chartwell Trust in 1996; disbanded by the Chartwell Trust to various locations in 1996 illustrated Gregory O’Brien. Pat Hanly, Auckland: Ron Sang Publications, 2012, foldout between pp. 95-96 Estimate $30,000 - $60,000

85

Darryn George

Kaha

oil on canvas signed Darryn George, dated 2006 and inscribed “Kaha” oil-canvas in ink verso

1000mm x 1500mm Estimate $6,000 - $9,000 86 Tony de Lautour

Head Count 9

acrylic on jute canvas signed Tony de Lautour, dated 1999 and inscribed HEAD count 9 in brushpoint lower edge

1210mm x 810mm Estimate $12,000 - $15,000

CATALOGUE 384

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87 Neil Dawson

Swan Song

polyurethane, velvet and aluminium, diptych 1050mm x 990mm x 35mm; 970mm x 710mm x 35mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Jonathan Jensen, Christchurch.

On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth EXHIBITED Jonathan Jensen Gallery Note Accomapnied by Artist made crate and installation inscructions, inscribed on inside of crate Estimate $6,000 - $8,000

88 Tony de Lautour Missile

acrylic on canvas signed Tony de Lautour and dated 1998 in brushpoint lower right and inscribed MISSILE in brushpoint upper left

200mm x 250mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Brooke Gifford Gallery.

EXHIBITED Brooke Gifford Gallery

Estimate $2,000 - $3,000

89 Tony de Lautour Untitled

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acrylic on paper Brooke Gifford Gallery label affixed verso 400mm x 500mm

Estimate $3,000 - $4,000

90

Jason Greig

Moment of Truth

monoprint, edition of 1 signed Jason Greig, dated 2004 and inscribed “Moment of Truth” in ink verso

385mm x 330mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay

EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery

Estimate $1,800 - $2,500

91

Jason Greig

A Graduate of Pythagorean Geometry

monoprint, edition of 1 signed Jason Greig and JAR Greig, dated 2003 and inscribed “A Graduate of Pythagorean Geometry” 1/1 monoprint in graphite verso

325mm x 270mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay

EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery

Estimate $1,500 - $2,500

92

Jason Greig

Hammerhead

monoprint, edition of 1 signed JAR Grieg, dated 2003 and inscribed monoprint 1/1 “HAMMERHEAD” in ink verso

325mm x 270mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay

EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery

Estimate $1,500 - $2,500

CATALOGUE 384

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93

L. Budd

94

L. Budd

95

L. Budd

Untitled (from the Object of Desire series)

Untitled (from the Object of Desire series)

Untitled (from the Object of Desire series)

epoxy resin, acrylic, ink, transfer on six sheets of paper Govett-Brewster Gallery label affixed verso 1356mm x 746mm

epoxy resin, acrylic, ink, transfer on six sheets of paper Govett-Brewster Gallery label affixed verso 1356mm x 746mm

epoxy resin, acrylic, ink, transfer on six sheets of paper Govett-Brewster Gallery label affixed verso 1356mm x 746mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay. On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery Estimate $3,000 - $6,000

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PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay. On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery Estimate $3,000 - $6,000

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay. On loan to Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery Estimate $3,000 - $6,000

96 Gavin Hipkins Eurasia

type C print, edition of 2 1355mm x 930mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay

EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery Estimate $4,000 - $6,000

Frequently described as a tourist of photography, Gavin Hipkins is an artist whose work is well known for its eclectic range of investigations into different photographic techniques, styles, subjects and display methods. As is common with Hipkins’ photographs, Eurasia does not fit neatly into the rest of his ouvre; work is demanded of the viewer to place it in a context. It is not even clear exactly what Eurasia is a photograph of. Through frosted glass, a monochrome image can be seen of a seemingly hand-carved artefact of

unknown origin and uncertain scale: a halfskeleton creature covered in the hardened remnants of some kind of fluid. Eurasia is an enigma. On its forehead, a mark or dent suggests a culture to which it once could have belonged. However, untouched by whatever has ravaged its upper half, the legs share a similarity with those of a contemporary action figure or doll, belying any such pretentions its creator might have had for it.

SIMON BOWERBANK

97

Julian Dashper

Chain Frame

acrylic paint on two factory moulding frames 1760mm x 1060mm x 240mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Peter McLeavey Gallery EXHIBITED Peter McLeavey Gallery Estimate $3,000 - $6,000

CATALOGUE 384

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98

Dick Frizzell

Woman and his Dog

oil on linen signed Frizzell, dated 14/1/2002 and inscribed Woman and his Dog in brushpoint lower left; Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso

1000mm x 1000mm

Estimate $14,000 - $20,000

99

Dick Frizzell

Apple Sign

oil on canvas signed Frizzell, dated 7/10/2004 and inscribed Apple Sign in brushpoint lower left; Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso

1000mm x 1100mm

Estimate $10,000 - $15,000

100

David Bromley

Untitled

oil on hessian signed Bromley in brushpoint lower right

1830mm x 1530mm

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Estimate $8,000 - $12,000

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101

Jason Greig

Surveyor of the Dominion

monoprint, edition of 1 signed Jason Grieg, dated 2002 and inscribed (1) “Surveyor of the Dominion” 1/1 monoprint in ink verso

360mm x 465mm

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PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Brooke Gifford Gallery.

EXHIBITED Brooke Gifford Gallery

Estimate $1,500 - $2,500

102 A. Lois White Decoration

ink, graphite and watercolour on paper signed A. Lois White in graphite lower right and inscribed “Decoration� in graphite low er left

180mm x 218mm

Estimate $4,000 - $6,000

103 Seraphine Pick

Nobody Knows

oil on canvas signed Seraphine Pick, dated 2003 in graphite verso; Michael Lett gallery label affixed verso

250mm x 200mm

Estimate $2,500 - $3,500

104 Maude Burge

On the Way to Market, Brittany

watercolour on paper signed M Burge in graphite lower right

400mm x 335mm

Estimate $10,000 - $15,000

CATALOGUE 384

137

105 Peter Stichbury

106

David Hatcher

The simplest surrealist act (André Breton)

Heather Traymont

giclee print on Ilford Galerie gold silk paper, 32/50 signed P. Stichbury and dated 06 in graphite lower right

540mm x 450mm

Estimate $4,000 - $6,000

screenprint on plexiglass, edition of 3 with artist’s proof signed D.H, dated 2002 and inscribed The simplest surrealist act (André Breton) in ink verso

370mm x 265mm

138

CATALOGUE 384

Estimate $1,000 - $2,000

107 Gavin Hipkins

108 Gavin Hipkins

109 Gavin Hipkins

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

c type print 490mm x 490mm

c type print 490mm x 490mm

c type print 490mm x 490mm

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay

PROVENANCE From the Helene Quilter Collection.

Acquired from Hamish McKay

EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery

EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery

EXHIBITED Hamish McKay Gallery

Estimate $1,800 - $2,500

Estimate $1,800 - $2,500

Estimate $1,800 - $2,500

CATALOGUE 384

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140

CATALOGUE 384

WEBB’S

Upcoming AuctionS & Market commentary Upcoming Auctions & Market Commentary 144 - 145

Important Paintings & Contemporary Art – Nov 2014

146 - 147

A2 Art – Sept 2014

148 - 149

Fine Jewellery & Watches – Sept 2014

150 - 151 Oceanic & African Art – Nov 2014 152 - 153

Interiors: Decorative Arts – Aug 2014

154 - 155

Fine Red Wine – Sept 2014

156 - 157

Modern Design – Nov 2014

158 - 159

Collectables & Interiors – Every Thursday

Who to Talk to at Webb’s 161

Regional Services

162 - 163

Valuation Services

164 - 168

Webb’s Departments & People

171

The Last Word - Carey Young - Head of Fine Art Services, Wellington

Terms & Conditions & Index of Artists 169

Webb’s Terms & Conditions for Buying

170

Index of Artists

CATALOGUE 384

141

10 ROOMS ONLY ˆ• CORPORATE RATES ˆ• ECO FRIENDLY ˆ• CENTRAL LOCATION ˆ•COMPLIMENTARY BROADBAND. OHTEL. 66 ORIENTAL PARADE WELLINGTON NEW ZEALAND ˆ• P +64 4 803 0600 ˆ• E ROOM@OHTEL.COM

WWW.OHTEL.COM

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

ENtries now invited FOR November 2014 AUCTION

Contact sophie coupland scoupland@webbs.co.nz /09 529 5603 CHARLES NInOW cninow@webbs.co.nz / 09 529 5601

important paintings & contemporary art

Colin McCahon, Kauri Trees, Titirangi, Achieved $412,700 144

CATALOGUE 384

WEBB’S

Webb’s important paintings & contemporary art MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

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price of the auction season achieved for Colin McCahon’s Kauri Trees, Titirangi

The beginning of 2014 saw Webb’s first sale of Important Paintings & Contemporary Art achieve a number of notable successes. Chief among these was the sale of Colin McCahon’s Kauri Trees, Titirangi, which achieved just over $412,700 – the highest sale price achieved by any work of art on the secondary market during the March–April sale season.

Another notable success was Lillian Budd’s installation, Modern World, which

Sophie Coupland Director Fine Art Department

“With this painting achieving a sale price that exceeded its reserve by 30%, the market’s dedication to acquiring exceptional paintings has determined that upper estimates are no longer glass ceilings.”

achieved a new record for the artist’s work with a price of $49,831. The sale of this seminal piece of New Zealand installation art is further evidence of the strength of contemporary works on the secondary market. Accordingly, our July catalogue contains some very exciting examples of contemporary practice. Two other sales worth mentioning are Tony Fomison’s Mental Defective, which easily shot past its reserve to achieve $128,975 and Bill Hammond’s Cave Painting 5, which

achieved $82,000, a new record for any work of that scale by the artist.

Entries are now invited for the next auction of Important Paintings & Contemporary Art which is due to be held in November 2014. Contact Sophie Coupland or Charles Ninow to organise a no-obligation auction appraisal and discuss consignment into this prestigious sale.

Webb’s important paintings & contemporary art SALES HIGHLIGHTS

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01 - Lillian Budd, Modern World. Achieved $49,831 02 - Tony Fomison, Mental Defective. Achieved $128,975 03 - Bill Hammond, Cave Painting 5. Achieved $82,000 04 - Gordon Walters, Untitled. Achieved $70,350 05 - Pat Hanly, Hope Vessel Attacked. Achieved $97,750

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06 - Shane Cotton, The Painted Bird. Achieved $117,250 07 - Kushana Bush, Turnbuckle Squat. Achieved $8,793 08 - Bill Hammond, Farmer’s Market. Achieved $328,300 09 - Charles Frederick Goldie. “One of the Old School”, Wiripine Ninia a Ngati Awa Chieftainess. Achieved $240,400 CATALOGUE 384

145

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

ENtries now invited FOR september 2014 AUCTION

A2 ART

Peter Siddell, Auckland View, Achieved $14,070 146

CATALOGUE 384

Contact charles ninow cninow@webbs.co.nz / 09 529 5601

WEBB’S

Webb’s A2 Art MARKET HIGHLIGHTS Charles Ninow Webb’s Fine Art Specialist

110%

“The continued increase in engagement from buyers at the A2 auctions reflects both the confidence of the market and the demand for the quality works that are offered in this auction category.”

average return on reserve Over $1-million total A2 turnover in 2014

A2 sale growth 2012 to 2014

The recent A2 sale, held in May, continued further the success of the preceding sale held in February. With over 300 works offered in two sessions, the sale witnessed increased engagement from enthusiastic buyers, which has resulted in a total turnover of more than $1 million for this auction category so far this year.

Graphic editions by artists such as Ralph Hotere, Don Binney and Dick Frizzell, alongside contemporary artists such as Bill Hammond and Reuben Paterson, witnessed strong demand from the market, with works by these artists

exceeding their published estimates.

Don Binney’s Swoop of the Kotare, Waimanu, achieved $11,725, reflecting ongoing demand for this series of prints and continuing Webb’s success after we set the record price for a print by a New Zealand artist in 2013. An untitled lithograph by Bill Hammond also exceeded its published estimate, achieving $4,340, and Hinenuitepo, by Reuben Paterson, achieved a sale price of $4,690, well over the published estimate for the work. Extremely strong market demand was witnessed for Self Portrait,

by Dick Frizzell, which also achieved a price above its estimate of $18,760 and the iconic Auckland View, by Peter Siddell, was another work that was the subject of much competition from buyers, achieving $14,070.

Entries are invited for our upcoming sale to be held in September. Please contact our art specialists to discuss consignment opportunities into future catalogues.

Webb’s A2 Art SALES HIGHLIGHTS febRuary 2014

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01 – Don Binney, Swoop of the Kotare, Waimanu. Achieved $11,725 02 – Ralph Hotere, A Cambridge Connection. Achieved $6,450 03 – Bill Hammond, Untitled. Achieved $4,340 04 – Ralph Hotere, London X. Achieved $7,915 05 – Dick Frizzell, Self Portrait. Achieved $18,760

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06 – Dick Frizzell, Man and His Dog. Achieved $27,000 07 – Peter Peryer, Alligator. Achieved $3,520 08 – Philip Clairmont, Mangamahu. Achieved $9,100 09 – Ralph Hotere, Le Pape Est Mort. Achieved $9,380 10 – Reuben Paterson, Hinenuitepo. Achieved $4,690 CATALOGUE 384

147

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

ENtries now invited FOR Sept 2014 AUCTION

Zora Bell Boyd zbellboyd@webbs.co.nz / 09 529 5606

fine JEWELLERY & Watches

A large, impressive fancy 9.58ct yellow-and-white diamond cluster ring.

Achieved $63,000 148

CATALOGUE 384

Anna Carr acarr@webbs.co.nz/ 09 529 5606

WEBB’S

Webb’s fine JEWELLERY & watches MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

$1.3m Total sales for 2014

Anna Carr Webb’s Jewellery Specialist

Zora Bell Boyd Webb’s Jewellery Specialist

“Antique and vintage jewellery is in hot demand as designers, looking for something new, turn to the past for inspiration.” – Zora Bell Boyd

The success of the recent Fine Jewellery & Watches sale held in May, confirms Webb’s position at the forefront of the jewellery market at auction. Excellent results were secured for vendors on the night, with nationwide interest and multiple post-auction transactions making this a successful auction across both the exclusive sale of Fine Jewellery & Watches and the more affordable Jewels: Buy/Sell/Collect categories. With a resurgence of interest in the art-deco movement in 2013, this year’s sales have witnessed burgeoning and continued interest from buyers for genuine

antique and vintage jewellery. Each of these sales offers a superb array of timeless treasures at a range of price points with May’s results ranging from $40 to $140,000.

Highlights from the May sale included a large, impressive, fancy yellow-and-white 6.20ct diamond cluster ring, CAD-designed in 18.00ct gold, which achieved $63,000.

Also of note was a stunning diamond and platinum tennis bracelet, designed with 34 round, brilliant-cut diamonds, which sold for $28,000 while a 3.00ct diamond and 18.00ct white gold solitaire ring, achieved $17,000.

Entries are now invited for the forthcoming auction of Fine Jewellery & Watches to be held in September. This sale will present a curated collection of prestigious jewellery and watches, along with our ever-popular, affordable Jewels: Buy/Sell/Collect sale to be held concurrently. The fully illustrated catalogue will include highly collectable Victorian and Edwardian pieces alongside contemporary jewels by leading brands, loose stones and men’s timepieces by leading makers. Contact us today for a freeof-charge auction market appraisal.

Webb’s fine JEWELLERY & watches SALE HIGHLIGHTS

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01 – A man’s Rolex Yacht Master steel and gold wristwatch in pristine condition.

Achieved $9,000 02 – A fine cushion-cut 2.30ct diamond ring and matching band. Achieved $10,500 03 – A very fine oval diamond pendant in white gold. Achieved $14,000 04– A very fine princess-cut 2.65ct solitaire diamond ring. Achieved $23,500

05 – A fine-quality Patek Philippe diamond-set gold necklace with earrings.

Achieved $14,000 06 – A modern, round, brilliant-cut 3.18ct solitaire diamond ring. Achieved $17,000 07 – A modern white-gold 2.10ct diamond dress ring. Achieved $15,000 08 – A stunning 11.00ct diamond tennis bracelet. Achieved $28,000 CATALOGUE 384

149

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

ENtries now invited FOR November 2014 AUCTION

Contact Jeff Hobbs jhobbs@webbs.co.nz / 021 503 251

oceanic AND african art

Important Mau/ Nga Tohu Tawhite. 1100 – 1300 achieved $35,175.00 150

CATALOGUE 384

WEBB’S

Webb’s Oceanic & African Art MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

424%

Jeff Hobbs Webb’s Oceanic & African Art Specialist

“Burgeoning interest from private collectors, dealers, museums and institutions has seen prices steadily rise for rare, early and well-documented pieces – consign now.”

Return on lots sold against reserve.

The Oceanic and African Art department has had five years under the guidance and direction of Oceanic Art specialist Jeff Hobbs and, during this time, Webb’s has quickly established itself as an industry leader, holding spectacular sales and setting new benchmarks of value across the category.

This department once again demonstrated its ability to source and bring to the market some of the world’s finest and rarest oceanic and tribal artefacts for

the initial sale of Important Oceanic and African Art for 2014, which included a diverse and a noteworthy collection of taonga Maori, and Polynesian, Melanesian and African arts and objects.

With spirited sale activity from independent buyers, private collectors, cultural institutions and international bidders, it is anticipated that the market for Oceanic and tribal art will continue performing solidly through the remainder of 2014.

Oceanic artefacts receive strong ongoing support from a range of collectors, with prominent highlights including Lot 33, a rare and important Mau/Nga Tohu Tawhito, which achieved a sale price of $35,175, and Lot 78, a beautifully crafted and rare Mortlock Islands mask sourced from a private New York collection, with multiple bids resulting in a final sale price of $21,105.

Webb’s Oceanic & African Art SALES HIGHLIGHTS

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01 – Bari Figure. Achieved $3,520 02 – The Glew Collection Of Rare Carte De Viste/ Albumen Prints By Elizabeth Pulman. Achieved $11,725 03 – Rare Marquesan Islands Male Ancestor Figure. Achieved $10,000

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7

04 – Superb Fijian War Club. Achieved $12,310 05 – Carved Architectural Element. Achieved $3,520 06 – Solomon Island Adornment. Achieved $3,050 07 – Rare Gable Mask Satawan Atoll, Mortlock Island. Achieved $21,105 CATALOGUE 384

151

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

ENtries now invited FOR AUGUST 2014 AUCTION

Contact josh williams jwilliams@webbs.co.nz / 09 524 6804

Interiors: DECORATIVE ARTS & AnTIques

A Sterling Silver Tea Service. Achieved $3,800 152

CATALOGUE 384

WEBB’S

Webb’s DECORATIVE ARTS MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

195%

Josh Williams Webb’s Decorative Arts Specialist

Return on lots sold against reserve, 2014.

With nearly 1,000 lots presented, a 90% sell-through rate by value and total sales in excess of $500,000, this year’s sales of Interiors: Decorative Arts have seen consistent results across the diverse collecting genres of this category. Demand for Chinese antiques continues to flourish across a variety of media. Driven by a global movement of Chinese collectors seeking to celebrate their history, this trend was best highlighted late last year

“The second half of 2014 will see strong prices for Militaria collectables as we reach the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War One.” by the sale of a pair of carved rhinoceros horns for $797,300, the highest price ever paid on the New Zealand market for an antique in any category. Regardless of fluctuations in metal value, demand for quality sterling silver continues to grow with good Georgian sterling-silver tableware consistently achieving sale totals in excess of estimates. For the astute buyer, certain periods of antique furniture, especially those from the

Victorian period, represent good buying.

Items with a social or cultural connection to New Zealand’s history continue to resonate with collectors and strong prices have been achieved this year in this specialist sector of the market. Quality clocks, rugs, industrial furniture, vintage, taxidermy and lighting continue to remain popular.

Webb’s decorative arts recent SALES HIGHLIGHTS

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01 – 02 – 03 – 04 – 05 – 06 –

A 19th Century French Mantel Clock. Achieved $3,200 A Fine Quality Qianlong Bowl. Achieved $4,600 A 19th Century Rhinoceros Horn. Achieved $56,000 A Late Georgian Pollard Oak Bureau Bookcase. Achieved $4,200 A Pair of Daoguang Bowls. Achieved $3,100 A Black Forest Grandfather Clock. Achieved $12,800

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9

07 – 08 – 09 – 10 – 11 –

11

A Victorian Travelling Vanity Case. Achieved $3,500 A Jaeger Le-Coultre Atmos Clock. Achieved $3,200 A Bronze Discobolus Figure. Achieved $2,100 A Bronze Spirit of Ecstasy Figure. Achieved $3,200 An Antique Tibetan Thanka. Achieved $3,500

CATALOGUE 384

153

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

ENtries now invited FOR September 2014 AUCTION

Contact simon ward wine@webbs.co.nz / 09 524 6804

fine & rare wine

154

CATALOGUE 384

WEBB’S

Webb’s FINE & RARE WINE MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

$1.37m

Simon Ward Webb’s Fine and Rare Wine Specialist

“The continued consolidation of the fine wine market in the first period of 2014 serves as a reminder that with a long-term view, potential opportunities can be found throughout the market for investors and collectors alike.”

Total value sold over the past year

Continuing the lead from the major international wine auction hubs (New York, London and Hong Kong) we have seen that following a decade of sustained growth, a pattern of decline has occurred, with prices dropping from their previous peaks. For astute investors with a longerterm strategy however, it is anticipated that the wine production deficit described

by Morgan Stanley as “the deepest shortfall in over 40 years of records”, will bring renewed opportunities in the mid to long-term market.

As buyer demand for Bordeaux first growths has eased, the market has continued to find inspiration in other regions, with Burgundy, Champagne and Italy all achieving a year on year increase.

The market for Burgundy wines is enjoying an exceptionally buoyant period, with the top-tier wines crafted in such small quantities and the supply of key vintages continuing to diminish, it is expected that the popularity and demand for the regions iconic wines will continue into the medium term.

re-emergence of Bordeaux in the auction market. There has been a continued focus on alternatives to the big blockbuster wine styles of previous years in both primary and secondary markets, with Burgundy being the main beneficiary of an increased demand for lighter, elegant wines.

Although many considered 2009 and 2010 the vintages of a lifetime, prices have remained relatively flat for Bordeaux, with relative high release prices for comparatively large production quantities as compared to some other collectible wines. The popularity of the wellestablished older Chateaux vintages continues unabated and following cyclical trends, expectations are for a general

Finally, the on-going success and confidence of the local hospitality sector has resulted in increasing interest and demand for well cellared/aged New Zealand wines. Bordeaux style wines from our best producers from Hawkes Bay, Waiheke Island and premium Pinot Noir from Martinborough and the South Island continue to be in high demand from restaurants, hotels and luxury lodges.

Webb’s FINE & RARE WINE SALES HIGHLIGHTS 3

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01 – Remy Martin Louis Xiii Cognac. Achieved $2,000 02 – 1830 Fromy Grand Fine Champagne. Achieved $2,700 03 – 2005 Rosusseau Chambertin. Achieved $2,400 04 – 1999 Penfolds Grange. Achieved $2,100

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05 – 1999 RDC La Tache. Achieved $3,500 06 – 2005 DRC Grand Echezeaux. Achieved $1,400 07 – 2005 DRC La Tache. Achieved $2,800 08 – 2003 Mugnier Chambolle-Mus “Amour”. Achieved $2,400 CATALOGUE 384

155

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

ENtries now invited FOR November 2014 AUCTION

Contact Josh Williams jwilliams@webbs.co.nz / 09 524 6804

MODERN DESIGn In association with mr. Bigglesworthy

A Danish Zebrawood Executive Desk. Achieved $10,800 156

CATALOGUE 384

WEBB’S

Webb’s MODERN DESIGN MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

37%

Josh Williams Webb’s Modern Design Specialist

“The May ‘Inside Out’ collection set a new Webb’s sale total record, resulting in our most successful modern design auction to date.”

increase in average sale totals over 18 months.

in the marketplace in three years. The combination of market-fresh, imported stock and a tightly curated selection of high-end furniture and designer objects appealed to a wide audience of New Zealand design aficionados.

Webb’s Modern Design auctions, in association with Mr. Bigglesworthy, have established themselves as the leading source of mid-century modern design in New Zealand.

The recent ‘Inside Out’ auction, held in May, set a record total for a modern design sale, trumping our previous best – last year’s ‘American Collection’ – and achieved the strongest result

Entries are now invited for a forthcoming auction in this category to be held in November. These biannual sales are the first-choice option in which to achieve

broad exposure in the New Zealand market and to realise the maximum value from mid-century collectable furniture. The November sale will be held in conjunction with a specialist auction comprising a superb collection of vintage vinyl records and vintage skateboards from the Frank Edwards skateboard collection.

Webb’s MODERN DESIGN SALES HIGHLIGHTS

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01 – A Danish Leather Sofa. Achieved $3,400 02 – A Gents of Leicester Town Clock. Achieved $8,200 03 – A Curtis Jere Sunburst Wall Mirror. Achieved $1,950 04 – A United Diamond Walnut Credenza. Achieved $4,000 05 – A Pair of Swedish Armchairs by Jon Jansen. Achieved $3,750

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06 – An Adrian Pearsall Gondola Sofa by Craft Associates. Achieved $6,000 07 – A Pair of Vernor Panton Cone Chairs by Plus Ligne. Achieved $3,400 08 – A Dieter Waeckerlin Sideboard by Behr Mobel. Achieved $8,200 09 – A Peter Lovig Neilson Teak Desk by Dansk. Achieved $5,600 10 – A Pair of Table Lamps by Stiffel. Achieved $1,700 CATALOGUE 384

157

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

ENtries now invited FOR weekly sales

Contact Duncan rooney drooney@webbs.co.nz / 09 524 6804

collectables & interiors

A Small Crown Lynn Swan.

Achieved $125 158

CATALOGUE 384

WEBB’S

Webb’s collectables & Interiors MARKET HIGHLIGHTS

93% 10,194 sell through rate by volume 2014.

Duncan Rooney Webb’s Collectables & Interiors Specialist

“Shrewd and resourceful buyers, with the ability to identify opportunities beyond the weekly saleroom items, are reaping the benefits also of what these affordable sales have to offer”

lots sold for the first 6 months 2014.

A weekly offering of all things essential, collectable and curious, the Webb’s Collectables and Interiors sales offer a refreshingly relaxed auction experience, with 300 to 400 lots of household items, collectables, deceased estates and small private collections. The scope of the sales span whiteware, furniture, art, jewellery, china and everything in between, with a diverse range of tastes catered for, from Victorian to contemporary.

manufacturers; Royal Doulton, Royal Albert and New Zealand icon Crown Lynn, all of which achieve strong prices as buyers scour auctions for authentic pieces from the golden age of pottery.

Mid-20th-century furniture and lighting are also commonly available and keenly sought by discerning hunters, while enterprising buyers can also acquire bargain-priced items from the utilitarian to furniture and collectables from the Victorian, Edwardian and art-deco eras.

These sales regularly offer quality porcelain and ceramics by well-known

Held weekly on Thursday’s at 4:00pm, these sales are an opportunity for new

collectors to enter the market. All lots are illustrated online from Wednesday afternoon.

Be sure to like the our Facebook page - www.facebook.com/ collectablesandinteriorsatwebbs where you’ll find weekly highlights of the sale, design ideas from around the world, information on design-related topics, as well as links to brand pages that we think you’ll enjoy.

Webb’s collectables & Interiors SALES HIGHLIGHTS

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01 – A Japanese Industrial Floor Standing Fan. Achieved $50 02 – A Pair of George Nelson Lampshades. Achieved $160 03 – A Verner Panton Tulip Base Standard Lamp. Achieved $230 04 – A Wedgwood teal tea set. Achieved $190 05 – A Pair of Globe Bookends. Achieved $30 06 – A Tonka Fire Engine. Achieved $100

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07 – A pair of Mid-century Orange Chairs. Achieved $50 08 – A Mid-century Orange lamp. Achieved $50 09 – A Pair of Chinese Vases. Achieved $70 10 – A small Microscope. Achieved $60 11 – A Crown Lynn Kiwi Vase. Achieved $70 12 – A Half Sphere Table Lamp. Achieved $230 CATALOGUE 384

159

Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

ENtries now invited FOR september 2014 AUCTION

Contact ben ashley bashley@webbs.co.nz / 09 524 6804

BETHUNES The forthcoming auction of Rare Books, to be held on 7 August, presents a unique selection of New Zealand poetry from the collection of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell. Featuring many rare, signed editions by authors such as Denis Glover, James K Baxter and Allen Curnow, this sale presents a unique opportunity for collectors. Further highlights include a large number of important historical

160

CATALOGUE 384

New Zealand and Pacific volumes consigned from Australia and the United Kingdom, as well as an extensive range of antiquarian and children’s titles.

Webb’s Rare Books department specialises in the sale at auction of rare, out-of-print and collectable books, historical photography, maps and plans, manuscripts, documents and ephemera, posters and prints, and postcards.

We supply bibliophiles nationally and around the globe, and our specialist subjects include: New Zealand history and biography; Maori and Mariori; Australia and the Pacific; voyages and travels; Captain James Cook; natural history; transport; sport and recreation; the military; literature; antiquarian titles; and bibliography.

WEBB’S

contact a webb’s specialist

REGIONAL SERVICES webb’s wellington Webb’s provides a comprehensive auction service for Wellington clients. A Webb’s presence in Wellington and streamlined services between the two centres enable ease of access to the Auckland market for those in the ‘arts and culture capital’.

Wellingtonians have long supported Webb’s both as collectors and consignors.

A five-day-a-week appraisal and valuation service and personally supervised, door-todoor freight and logistics extends beyond Wellington to the entire lower North and upper South Islands. Webb’s Wellington services are headed by Carey Young and Jeff Hobbs.

currant market appraisals, commentary on current market trends, valuations and consignment and acquisition advice.

A 20 year veteran expert in Oceanic, Tribal arts and antiquities, Jeff operated as a successful dealer and consultant in New York and the United Kingdom during the 1990s and subsequently owned and operated the well respected Sulu Gallery, Wellington. Although Jeff’s specialist interests lie in the fields of Tribal art and Eastern antiques, he will be working closely with Webb’s Auckland specialists to provide services across the spectrum of antiques and collectables.

contact Jeff Hobbs jhobbs@webbs.co.nz / 021 503 251 Carey Young cyoung@webbs.co.nz / 021 368 348

Jeff Hobbs Webb’s Oceanic Art Specialist

Carey Young Head of Fine Art Services, Wellington

Fine art specialist and gallerist, Carey Young leads Webb’s art department services in Wellington and is available to undertake

webb’s south island Gillie Deans, our resident Christchurch and South Island specialist, has over 30 years’ experience within the visual arts community. Gillie provides comprehensive fine art services including current market and insurance valuations, conservation and advice around the purchase and sale of artworks by auction or private treaty.

Working with those who are both new to collecting art and seasoned connoisseurs, Gillie prides herself on providing accurate market-based knowledge and working with discretion and honesty.

Gillie Deans gdeans@webbs.co.nz / 027 226 9785

Gillie Deans Resident South Island Specialist

“…Gillie Deans provides comprehensive fine art services including current market and insurance valuations.”

CATALOGUE 384

161

Len Lye, Self Portrait, hand-worked photograph of a photogram.

Webb’s recently undertook a valuation of The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and the complete holdings of the Len Lye Foundation’s collections and archives.

WEBB’S

commissions now invited Webb’s Valuations service

Contact Ben ashley bashley@webbs.co.nz / 09 529 5609

Valuations

Webb’s Valuation department is the most comprehensive of its kind in New Zealand.

With over 35 years of experience and a team of 20 specialist staff members, we provide tailored services that set the industry standard. Webb’s cultural asset valuer, Ben Ashley has recently prepared a valuation of the entire collection holdings at the National Library of New Zealand.

• Te Papa Tongarewa • Wellington City Council • Numerous regional museums and galleries

- Fine and Rare Wine - Vintage Motorcycles - Fashion and Textiles - Household Chattels

Webb’s valuers offer a proven ability to accurately undertake valuations for any items, from single pieces to complete collections, within set time frames and in a cost-effective manner.

Valuations are prepared for the purposes of: - Insurance - Post-loss Insurance - Family Estate Division - Financial Reporting - Relationship Property Division - Corporate Compliance

Specialist fields of expertise include: - New Zealand and International Art - Photography - Ceramics - Antiques and Decorative Arts - Modern Design - Maori Artefacts and Oceanic Art - Books, Rare Documents, Maps and Manuscripts

Other significant recent valuations conducted by Webb’s include: • University of Otago art collection • Govett-Brewster Art Gallery • Len Lye Foundation • Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki • Auckland Council • Auckland War Memorial Museum

Webb’s valuations are based on industrystandard methodology and are accepted by all of the leading insurance companies and brokers. To discuss your valuation requirements or for a no-obligation quote, contact Ben Ashley. Mob: 021 113 8881.

Webb’s valuations recent comissions

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01 – Te Papa Tongarewa 02 – Olveston Historic House, Dunedin 03 – Auckland Art Gallery, Toi O Tamaki

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04 – Motat, Auckland 05 – Wellington CIty Council, Public Art Collection

CATALOGUE 384

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

Webb’s people Over 38 years of experience in fine art and auctions.

Founded in 1976, Webb’s created a market for contemporary art at auction through the 1980s and led the rise of the art market in the early 2000s, establishing a position as New Zealand’s foremost auction house. Webb’s has a total turnover of roughly twice that of any other New Zealand auction house, unsurpassed specialist expertise and the business diversity needed to cater for an all-encompassing range of collecting genres; thus, our identity is shaped as an acclaimed industry authority.

Fine Art Department Webb’s Fine Art department has an unmatched reputation for excellent service in achieving record prices at auction for contemporary, early modern, modern and historical artworks. Our extensive Fine Art calendar leads the market and consists of specialist sales of Important New Zealand Works of Art, Contemporary Art, Historical Works of Art, Photography and A2 Art (auction tier two).

Sophie Coupland — BA, Head of Department, Fine Art With 16 years’ experience in the fine art industry, Sophie’s 19th to 21st-century fine art knowledge is extensive and highly referenced. She has managed the sale and placement of many of the country’s finest and most-coveted works of art, and headed the Webb’s Fine Art department through the rise of the market (1999 – 2004).

Mobile: +64 21 510 876 DDI: +64 9 529 5603 scoupland@webbs.co.nz

Charles Ninow — MFA, Fine Art Specialist Charles joined Webb’s in 2011 and has an expert, well-referenced knowledge of the New Zealand secondary market. Particularly, his areas of interest lie in the modern and contemporary periods. In addition to this, he is also engaged with current critical discourse surrounding the primary market and the institutional sector. Charles holds a master’s degree from Elam School of Fine Arts.

Gillie Deans — Resident South Island Specialist With over 30 years’ experience within the visual arts community, Gillie provides fine art services to Christchurch and South Island clients including current market and insurance valuations, conservation and advice around the purchase and sale of artworks by auction or private treaty.

Carey Young — Head of Fine Art Services, Wellington Founder and director of newly opened Wellington contemporary gallery The Young, Carey previously worked for leading dealer gallery Hamish McKay and has over ten years’ experience in the industry. She is available in Wellington to provide commentary on current market trends and valuations for market and insurance purposes.

Simon Bowerbank – BFA, BA (Hons), MFA, Fine Art Specialist With a background in commercial gallery management, curatorial work and artist’s studio management, Simon joins Webb’s with an extremely broad knowledge of contemporary art.

Investment in the careers of young artists is of particular interest to him, as are the emerging markets for digital art. He holds an honours degree in Art History and a master’s degree from Elam School of Fine Arts.

Hannah Daly — BA, Registrar, Fine Art Department Hannah holds a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in Art History and History from The University of Auckland. She has a strong interest in European modernism, particularly across the fields of fine art and design.

Aleksandra Petrovic — BFA, PgDipFA, Junior Fine Arts Specialist, Registrar With an interest in modern and contemporary art, Aleksandra has previous experience in commercial and contemporary art spaces and galleries, and a background in fine art.

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Mobile: +64 29 770 4767 DDI: +64 9 529 5601 cninow@webbs.co.nz

Mobile: +64 27 226 9785 gdeans@webbs.co.nz

Mobile: +64 21 368 348 cyoung@webbs.co.nz

DDI: +64 9 524 6804 sbowerbank@webbs.co.nz

DDI: +64 9 524 6804 artteam@webbs.co.nz

DDI: +64 9 524 6804 apetrovic@webbs.co.nz

WEBB’S

Christopher Swasbrook DDI: +64 9 524 6804 chris.swasbrook@elevationcapital.co.nz

Chris Allsop Mobile: +64 21 679 319 DDI: +64 9 529 5605 callsop@webbs.co.nz

Sophie Coupland Mobile: +64 21 510 876 DDI: +64 9 529 5603 scoupland@webbs.co.nz

Katrina Sewell DDI: +64 9 524 6804 ksewell@webbs.co.nz

Charles Ninow Mobile: +64 29 770 4767 DDI: +64 9 529 5601 cninow@webbs.co.nz

Simon Bowerbank DDI: +64 9 524 6804 sbowerbank@webbs.co.nz

Aleksandra Petrovic DDI: +64 9 524 6804 apetrovic@webbs.co.nz

Hannah Daly DDI: +64 9 524 6804 artteam@webbs.co.nz

James Hogan Mobile: +64 21 510 477 jhoganl@webbs.co.nz

Josh Williams DDI: +64 9 524 6804 jwilliams@webbs.co.nz

Aimee Moore DDI: +64 9 524 6804 amoore@webbs.co.nz

Ben Ashley DDI: +64 9 524 6804 bashley@webbs.co.nz

Anna Carr DDI: +64 9 529 5606 acarr@webbs.co.nz

Peter Downey DDI: +64 9 529 5606 jewels@webbs.co.nz

Ruri Rhee DDI: +64 9 529 5606 jewelleryteam@webbs.co.nz

Zora Bell Boyd Mobile: +64 21 268 589 DDI: +64 9 529 5606 zbellboyd@webbs.co.nz

Simon Ward Mobile: +64 21 642 277 DDI: +64 9 529 5600 wine@webbs.co.nz

Charis Robinson DDI: +64 9 524 6804 design@webbs.co.nz

Greg Stoffels DDI: +64 9 524 6804 marketing@webbs.co.nz

Daniel Koene DDI: +64 9 524 6804 tech@webbs.co.nz

Mandy Thorogood DDI: +64 9 524 6804 frontofhouse@webbs.co.nz

Ben Erren DDI: +64 9 524 6804 berren@webbs.co.nz

Duncan Rooney DDI: +64 9 524 6804 drooney@webbs.co.nz

Jeff Hobbs Mobile: +64 21 503 251 jhobbs@webbs.co.nz

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departments Antiques & Decorative Arts, Collectables & Estates Department The Antiques & Decorative Arts department comprises a dedicated, experienced team of specialists covering 20th/21st-century design, New Zealand ceramics, Maori and Oceanic arts, folk art, colonial furniture, European ceramics and glassware, Asian arts, clocks, marine and nautical instruments, sterling silver, textiles and vintage clothing, and toys and dolls.

Complementarily, the Collectables & Estates department hold affordable weekly sales offering a wide variety of interesting and useful items including antiques, household furnishings, collectables, appliances, crockery, cutlery, jewellery, paintings and prints.

James Hogan — Head of Department, Antiques & Decorative Arts James has worked with Webb’s for over 20 years, and is a highly experienced senior valuer and appraiser of antiques and decorative arts from the 18th to the 21st centuries. His particular interests include New Zealand colonial furniture, English and Continental furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries, retro and modernist furniture and interior objects.

Mobile: +64 21 510 477 jhoganl@webbs.co.nz

Josh Williams — BA, Auction Manager, Antiques & Decorative Arts Having worked for Auckland Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in antique shops in London, Josh’s specialist interests include Georgian furniture and antiques, and mid-century modern design. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree (The University of Auckland) and a Postgraduate Certificate in Museum Studies (The University of Sydney).

DDI: +64 9 524 6804 jwilliams@webbs.co.nz

Duncan Rooney — BFA, Auction Manager, Collectables & Interiors With a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, Duncan is also a keen carpenter, designing and making a range of contemporary furniture in his spare time. Duncan is available to provide advice to clients on all matters relating to our weekly sales and the auction process.

DDI: +64 9 524 6804 drooney@webbs.co.nz

Ben Erren — Auction Coordinator, Collectables & Interiors Studying Economics and Art History at the University of Auckland, Ben joined the Webb’s team in 2013. He has a strong interest in modern design and contemporary art, particularly midcentury design, and current contemporary practice.

DDI: +64 9 524 6804 berren@webbs.co.nz

Fine Wine Department Webb’s Fine & Rare Wine department leads the New Zealand auction market in the sale of fine, collectable wine. Webb’s sales feature fine New Zealand wines, premium Australian wines, Champagne, First Growth Bordeaux, premium Burgundy and a selection of Sauternes, Ports, Italian wines and Cognacs.

Simon Ward — RAWM, Head of Department, Fine Wine Department Simon joined Webb’s as director of the Fine Wine department in 2009. With over 20 years in the industry encompassing production, sales, marketing and winery management, Simon’s international experience includes four years based in Italy. He holds an Associate Diploma of Wine Marketing (Roseworthy College, South Australia).

Mobile: +64 21 642 277 DDI: +64 9 529 5600 wine@webbs.co.nz

Oceanic And African Art Department Two sales are held annually in this specialised area of collecting. Sales feature artefacts from the pre-contact and contact periods through to 20th-century works. Pieces covered include those used for ritual, ceremonial, decorative and practical purposes within traditional Maori and Oceanic and African cultures, as well as New Zealand colonial furniture.

Jeff Hobbs — Head of Department, Oceanic And African Art Jeff is a veteran expert in Oceanic, Tribal Arts and antiquities. A successful dealer and consultant in New York and the United Kingdom during the 1990s, he subsequently owned and operated Wellington’s well-respected Sulu Gallery. Jeff has travelled internationally on behalf of Webb’s repatriating significant Maori and Oceanic material.

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Mobile: +64 21 503 251 jhobbs@webbs.co.nz

WEBB’S

Fine Jewellery & Watches.

Webb’s jewellery sales include a wide selection of fine and magnificent jewels together with valuable watches, significant diamonds, the finest antique and modern jewels, and watches from the most sought-after makers in the world.

Zora Bell Boyd — BA (Hons), BDes, Head of Department, Jewellery Zora has a background in precious gemstone trading, bespoke jewellery manufacture and high fashion. She established Wunderkammer, a boutique fashion destination, and her own jewellery range, and has over 10 years’ experience sourcing precious stones and antique jewellery from locations as far afield as South America and Asia.

Mobile: +64 21 268 589 DDI: +64 9 529 5606 zbellboyd@webbs.co.nz

Peter Downey — Senior Specialist, Valuer – Antique Jewellery A founding director of Webb’s jewellery department in the 1980s, Peter has 44 years of market experience and is one of New Zealand’s foremost jewellery specialists. He has a comprehensive knowledge of all materials and styles, and his specialist areas include Castellani, Giuliano, Fabergé, Cartier, art nouveau and art deco.

DDI: +64 9 529 5606 jewels@webbs.co.nz

Anna Carr — BDes, DipTeach, Jewellery Specialist Anna Carr (nee Ward) is a practising jeweller who, since graduating in 2004 with a Bachelor of Design (Honours) degree, majoring in Contemporary Jewellery, and a Postgraduate Diploma in teaching, has exhibited nationally and internationally. Prior to starting at Webb’s, Anna worked as a Jewellery Coordinator at Masterworks for four years.

DDI: +64 9 529 5606 acarr@webbs.co.nz

Ruri Rhee — Jewellery Auction Assistant & Administrator Ruri has a strong interest in contemporary jewellery design and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and is currently working towards her Masters Degree in Arts Management.

Working closely with Zora Bell Boyd, Anna Carr and Peter Downey to facilitate the operations of the Webb’s fine Jewellery Department, Ruri has been part of the Webb’s team now for nearly a year.

DDI: +64 9 529 5606 jewelleryteam@webbs.co.nz

Valuations Department.

Webb’s provides valuation services to public institutions, and corporate and private collections, including Auckland Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa and numerous regional galleries and museums. Domestic valuation services include single items or entire collections and cover artworks and the full spectrum of antiques, interiors, modern design and collectables.

Ben Ashley — Valuations Manager and head of the Rare Books department.

As the valuations manager, Ben has a sound knowledge across all collecting genres and is a specialist in rare books, manuscripts and historical photography. Ben studied New Zealand literature at The University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington and the International Institute of Modern Letters.

DDI: +64 9 524 6804 bashley@webbs.co.nz

Modern Design Department Held twice annually, these sales present design classics and pieces by the world’s most celebrated designers. Webb’s modern design partnership with mid-century specialists Mr. Bigglesworthy ensures that high-calibre, classic and desirable designs are offered.

Josh Williams — BA, Head of Department, Modern Design Having worked for Auckland Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in antique shops in London, Josh’s specialist interests include Georgian furniture and antiques, and mid-century modern design. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree (The University of Auckland) and a Postgraduate Certificate in Museum Studies (The University of Sydney).

DDI: +64 9 524 6804 jwilliams@webbs.co.nz

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

departments Bethunes at Webb’s – Rare Book Department.

Bethunes operates as the rare book department of Webb’s. The department deals in rare, out-of-print and collectable books, historical photography, maps and plans, manuscripts, documents and ephemera, posters and prints, and postcards.

Ben Ashley — BA, Head of Department, Rare Books Ben has a background of over ten years’ experience in high-end retail, and his varied skills and knowledge provide a fresh, pragmatic approach to book sales and appraisals. Ben studied New Zealand Literature at The University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington and the International Institute of Modern Letters.

DDI: +64 9 524 6804 bashley@webbs.co.nz

Vintage Motorcycles & Industrial Design Department Webb’s is the market leader in the sale of collectors’ motorcycles in Australasia. As the largest auction house in New Zealand to hold scheduled exhibitions and auctions of important motorcycles, Webb’s delivers international prices and expert service to its clients and caters for both local and global demand for superior machines.

Mobile: +64 21 679 319 DDI: +64 9 529 5605 callsop@webbs.co.nz

Management Christopher Swasbrook – Chairman Christopher is an independent director of NZX-listed Mowbray Collectables, the parent company of Webb’s. Christopher is currently managing director of Elevation Capital Management Limited, a global funds management company (which he founded) based in Auckland, New Zealand. He is a member of the NZ Markets Disciplinary Tribunal and the NZX Listing Sub-Committee, as well as a trustee and director of the Te Tuhi Contemporary Arts Trust in Auckland. Elevation Capital Management Limited is also a major sponsor of the Auckland Art Gallery’s Walters Prize – New Zealand’s premier contemporary art prize.

John Mowbray – Director John is the managing director and largest shareholder of NZX-listed Mowbray Collectables, the parent company of Webb’s. Since starting Mowbray Collectables in 1963, John has made philately his career, specialising in the auctioning of stamps. He is past president of the New Zealand Stamp Dealers Association and a past president of the International Federation of Stamp Dealers Associations (IFSDA). From 1989 to 1995, he was a director of Stanley Gibbons Group PLC Limited, London. John is currently patron of the Waikanae Rugby Football Club and the Kapiti Philatelic Society. He is chairman of the Horowhenua Kapiti Rugby Union and the Mahara Gallery Trust. John is also a director of Sotheby’s Australia of which Mowbray Collectables currently owns 25%.

Ian Halsted – Director Ian is a director and shareholder of NZX-listed Mowbray Collectables, the parent company of Webb’s. Ian’s previous corporate experience includes his being managing director of Hedley Byrne New Zealand Limited, managing director of Hallenstein Glasson Holdings Limited and a director of Hallenstein Bros Limited and Mr Chips Holdings Limited. He is also a past president of the New Zealand Retailers Federation and has served on the boards of several private companies.

Chris Allsop — DipActg, DipIntlMktg, General Manager Chris Allsop comes to Webb’s with over 20 years’ experience in accounting, administration and business management. Having been with Webb’s for seven years, he brings to the business exceptional financial and management skills.

Mowbray Collectables Ltd Mowbray Collectables Ltd is a publicly listed parent company which houses a range of auction based assets in key fields of collecting and cultural investment. Mowbray Collectables also hold a 25% equity stake in Sotheby’s Australia. John Mowbray is the former President of the International Federation of Stamp Dealers Associations and is a director of Webb’s and Sotheby’s Australia.

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Mobile: +64 21 679 319 DDI: +64 9 529 5605 callsop@webbs.co.nz

WEBB’S

CONDITIONS of sale for buyers 1. Bidding. The highest bidder shall be the purchaser subject to the auctioneer having the right to refuse the bid of any person.

Should any dispute arise as to the bidding, the lot in dispute will be immediately put up for sale again at the preceding bid, or the auctioneer may declare the purchaser, which declaration shall be conclusive. No person shall advance less at a bid than the sum nominated by the auctioneer, and no bid may be retracted.

2. Reserves. All lots are sold subject to the right of the seller or her/ his agent to impose a reserve.

3. Registration. Purchasers shall complete a bidding card before the sale giving their own correct name, address and telephone number.

It is accepted by bidders that the supply of false information on a bidding card shall be interpreted as deliberate fraud.

4. Buyer’s Premium. The purchaser accepts that in addition to the hammer or selling price Webb’s will apply a buyer’s premium of 15% for the sale, (unless otherwise stated), together with GST on such premiums.

5. Payment. Payment for all items purchased is due on the day of sale immediately following completion of the sale.

If full payment cannot be made on the day of sale a deposit of 10% of the total sum due must be made on the day of sale and the balance must be paid within 5 working days.

Payment is by cash, bank cheque or Eftpos. Personal and private cheques will be accepted but must be cleared before goods will be released. Credit cards are not accepted.

6. Lots sold as Viewed. All lots are sold as viewed and with all errors in description, faults and imperfections whether visible or not. Neither Webb’s nor its vendor are responsible for errors in description or for the genuineness or authenticity of any lot or for any fault or defect in it. No warranty whatsoever is made. Buyers proceed upon their own judgement.

Buyers shall be deemed to have inspected the lots, or to have made enquiries to their complete satisfaction, prior to sale and by the act of bidding shall be deemed to be satisfied with the lots in all respects.

7. Webb’s Act as Agents. They have full discretion to conduct all aspects of the sale and to withdraw any lot from the sale without giving any reason.

8. Collection. Purchases are to be taken away at the buyer’s expense immediately after the sale except where a cheque remains uncleared. If this is not done Webb’s will not be responsible if the lot is lost, stolen, damaged or destroyed.

Any items not collected within seven days of the auction may be subject to a storage and insurance fee. A receipted invoice must be produced prior to removal of any lot.

C. To resell the lot by public or private sale. Any deficiency resulting from such resale, after giving credit to the purchaser for any part payment, together with all costs incurred in connection with the lot shall be paid to Webb’s by the purchaser. Any surplus over the proceeds of sale shall belong to the seller and in this condition the expression ‘proceeds of sale’ shall have the same meaning in relation to a sale by private treaty as it has in relation to a sale by auction.

D. To store the lot whether at Webb’s own premises or elsewhere at the sole expense of the purchaser and to release the lot only after the purchase price has been paid in full plus the accrued cost of removal storage and all other costs connected to the lot.

E. To charge interest on the purchase price at a rate 2% above Webb’s bankers’ then current rate for commercial overdraft facilities, to the extent that the price or any part of it remains unpaid for more than seven days from the date of the sale.

F. To retain possession of that or any other lot purchased by the purchaser at that or any other auction and to release the same only after payment of money due.

G. To apply the proceeds of sale of any lot then or subsequently due to the purchaser towards settlement of money due to Webb’s or its vendor. Webb’s shall be entitled to a possessory lien on any property of the purchaser for any purpose while any monies remain unpaid under this contract.

H. To apply any payment made by the purchaser to Webb’s towards any money owing to Webb’s in respect of any thing whatsoever irrespective of any directive given in respect of, or restriction placed upon, such payment by the purchaser whether expressed or implied.

I. Title and right of disposal of the goods shall not pass to the purchaser until payment has been made in full by cleared funds.

Where any lot purchased is held by Webb’s pending i. clearance of funds by the purchaser or ii. completion of payment after receipt of a deposit, the lot will be held by Webb’s as bailee for the vendor, risk and title passing to the purchaser immediately upon notification of clearance of funds or upon completion of purchase.

In the event that a lot is lost, stolen, damaged or destroyed before title is transferred to the purchaser, the purchaser shall be entitled to a refund of all monies paid to Webb’s in respect of that lot, but shall not be entitled to any compensation for any consequent losses howsoever arising.

11. Bidders deemed Principals. All bidders shall be held personally and solely liable for all obligations arising from any bid, including both ‘telephone’ and ‘absentee’ bids. Any person wishing to bid as agent for a third party must obtain written authority to do so from Webb’s prior to bidding.

9. Licences. Buyers who purchase an item which falls within the provisions of the Protected Objects Act 1975 or the Arms Act 1958 cannot take possession of that item until they have shown to Webb’s a license under the appropriate Act.

12. ‘Subject Bids’. Where the highest bid is below the reserve and the auctioneer declares a sale to be ‘subject to vendor’s consent’ or words to that effect, the highest bid remains binding upon the bidder until the vendor accepts or rejects it. If the bid is accepted there is a contractual obligation upon the bidder to pay for the lot.

10. Failure to make Payment. If a purchaser fails either to pay for or take away any lot, Webb’s shall without further notice to the purchaser, at its absolute discretion and without prejudice to any other rights or remedies it may have, be entitled to exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies:

13. SALES POST AUCTION OR BY PRIVATE TREATY. The above conditions shall apply to all buyers of goods from Webb’s irrespective of the circumstances under which the sale is negotiated.

A. To issue proceeding against the purchaser for damages for breach of contract.

B. To rescind the sale of that or any other lot sold to the purchaser at the same or any other auction.

14. Condition of Items. Condition of items is not detailed in this catalogue. Buyers must satisfy themselves as to the condition of lots they bid on and should refer to clause six. Webb’s are pleased to provide intending buyers with condition reports on any lots.

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Important Paintings and Contemporary Art

INDEX OF ARTISTS Ball, Martin

63

Hotere, Ralph

29, 42, 47, 52, 53, 54

Binney, Don

30

Killeen, Richard

35

Blomfield, Charles

82

Lee, Jae Hoon

61, 68

Bromley, David

100

Lee, Hye Rim

69

Budd, L.

5, 6, 31, 56, 70, 75, 93, 94, 95

Maddox, Allen

33, 57

Burge, Maude

104

McCahon, Colin

15, 17, 22, 23, 26, 48, 51, 55

Clairmont, Philip

45

McLeod, Andrew

77

Cotton, Shane

24, 78

Mrkusich, Milan

60

Dashper, Julian

97

Pardington, Fiona

76

Dawson, Neil

87

Parekowhai, Michael

2

de Lautour, Tony

10, 64, 86, 88, 89

Pearson, Alan

66

Dibble, Paul

14

Driver, Don

21, 43, 59

Pick, Seraphine

36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 67, 103

Fomison, Tony

8, 65, 81

Robinson, Peter

11, 49

Frank, Dale

13

Stevenson, Michael

3, 4

Friedlander, Marti

58

Stichbury, Peter

19, 105

Frizzell, Dick

20, 98, 99

Sydney, Grahame

27

George, Darryn

85

Tapper, Garth

62

Gimblett, Max

9, 12, 25

Thomson, Elizabeth

71

Greig, Jason

90, 91, 92, 101

Thornley, Geoff

74

Hammond, Bill

18, 28, 32, 79, 80

Todd, Yvonne

34

Hanly, Pat

1, 7, 16, 46, 84

van Hout, Ronnie

72, 73

Harris, Jeffrey

44

Wealleans, Rohan

50

Hatcher, David

106

White, A. Lois

102

Hipkins, Gavin

96, 107, 108, 109

Woollaston, Toss

83

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WEBB’S

THE LAST WORD

carey young

Head of Fine Art Services, Wellington As Webb’s Head of Fine Art Services in Wellington, Carey Young has been instrumental in securing a number of the major works that have been included in recent auctions at Webb’s.

In February 2013, after working for Hamish McKay in Wellington for a number of years, Carey opened The Young, an eponymously named gallery in Wellington’s Mt Victoria. As well as providing a home for the practices of both emerging and established artists and a venue for Webb’s Wellington exhibitions of sale highlights, this new exhibition space

provides Carey with a base of operations for her uniquely multifaceted position in the New Zealand commercial art world.

By acting as a much-needed conduit between the primary and secondary art markets, Carey aspires to fill a longstanding gap. Of her new enterprise, she says: “I care a lot about the industry and a lot about the artists that I have worked with over the past 10 years. My role is to support artists and collectors alike...By working with clients, artists and their works in a very personal and particular way I am best positioned to manage the natural cycle of art”.

Carey’s role as Webb’s representative in Wellington is a primary component of her day-to-day activity. As part of this position, Carey is responsible for facilitating key relationships with Wellington-based collectors: providing them with advice on current market trends and valuations for both market and insurance purposes. She is available in person and is always happy to meet with collectors in the Wellington region to discuss the release or acquisition of works.

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171