Cover:
31
Bill Hammond Flag
Right:
Jim Speers
Untitled (Contemporary Art, May 28)
Left:
23
Paul Dibble Soft Geometric, Series 2, No.1
Above:
8
Dale Frank
Abandoned
IMPORTANT PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE Prev i ew and Cre ative NZ fun c tion for the a r tis ts r e pr e s e n tin g New Z ea l and at the Ve nice B ie n n a l e , 2 0 0 9 : t hu r s d a y 26t h m a rc h - 6 - 8 pm vi ewi n g f ri da y 27th ma rch - t hu r sd a y 2n d a p r il 2009 A u ct i o n th u rsday 2n d apri l 2009 a t 6. 30p m 3 ab bey s tre et, n ewton, a u ck l a n d
contents 2
INTRODUCTION
34
AN X-Ray IMAGE OF LIFE Fomison’s ‘Detail for Dancing Skeleton’
7
IMPORTANT PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE (viewing times)
38
FLAG BY BILL HAMMOND
19
A WATERFALL by COLIN McCAHON an essay by Laurence Simmons
41
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” an essay on Bill Hammond’s FLY
23
I Had a Mind as Invisible as Light ... by JOHN PULE
44
BENT, BUCKLED AND BUFFED an essay on Ralph Hotere’s 1984 by DAVID EGGLETON
26
SCULPTURE 8 lots of New Zealand sculture
CONDITIONS OF SALE ABSENTEE BIDDING SIXTY-TWO CONTACTS SIXTY-THREE SUBSCRIBE SIXTY-FOUR INDEX OF ARTISTS
SIXTY
SIXTY-ONE
Welcome to ART+OBJECT’s first major catalogue for 2009. Last year’s final art auction saw A+O register our first one million dollar art sale and an indication that the art market at auction continues to be robust in New Zealand. A+O is proud to be selected to assist in fundraising and raising awareness for New Zealand’s participation at the 53rd Venice Biennale which opens in June. Artists Judy Millar and Francis Upritchard have been selected to represent New Zealand and plans are well underway for the transport to and installation of artworks in their respective locations. Creative NZ staff and the artists have been meeting art patrons and supporters to outline their exhibitions and plans for this prestigious art event. Both artists have generously created specific works to assist in the raising of funds for the Biennale. These works will be auctioned as lots 1 and 2 in this catalogue and may be seen at ART+OBJECT during the week’s viewing prior to the sale on April 2. These works are offered without the usual buyers’ premium and all funds raised go directly towards the significant costs associated with exhibiting at one of the leading international art events. This is a rare opportunity to acquire a significant work by these artists and contribute to the profile of the New Zealand art community in such a direct way. It is our opinion that the future provenance of these works in being associated with New Zealand’s participation at Venice will add significant value, so please bid with confidence and gusto.
Fondazione Claudio Buziol, the location for Francis Upritchard’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale
“The debut 2008 vintage is punchy, with very good intensity of smooth melon/lime flavours fresh and full of youthful impact” Invivo 2008 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc 4 stars, 2009 Buyer’s Guide to New Zealand Wine by Michael Cooper
“Classy label, captivating wine” John Hawkesby, Canvas Magazine
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THE
JIM DRUMMOND SALE
THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF A VISIONARY COLLECTOR
TWO DAY AUCTION : SATURDAY MAY 2ND SUNDAY MAY 3RD
Left:
Unknown carver
Fireplace surround as a pare and whakawae,
c.1880. (detail) $15 000 - $25 000
Peter Robinson I Exist I Am Not Another I Am (detail) lamda print mounted to aluminium, 2001, (edition of 5) 2200 x 1190mm $10 000 - $15 000
entries invited
contemporary art +
objects
May 28
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THE 21 CENTURY AU C T I O N H O U S E
IMPORTANT PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE th ur sd a y 2 a pr i l 6. 30pm 3 abbey s t r e e t , n e wt on a uc k l a n d
VIEWING thursday friday saturday sunday monday tuesday wednesday thursday
26 27 28 29 30 31 1 2
march march march march march march april april
opening preview
6pm 9am 11am 11am 9am 9am 9am 9am
– – – – – – – –
8pm 5pm 4pm 4pm 5pm 5pm 5pm 1pm
1
Francis Upritchard Chinese Ibis and Money Tree modelling material, paint, wood & glass vitrines, 2009 9 x 125 x 66 and 216 x 124 x 103mm Proceeds raised from the auction of this work will go to the artist’s individual project for Venice
THE 21ST CENTURY AUCTION HOUSE
Creative New Zealand and ART+OBJECT are proud to support artists Judy Millar and Francis Upritchard to represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale 2009. Proceeds raised from the auction of these works will go to the artists’ individual projects for Venice.
2
Judy Millar Simon-Peter acrylic and oil on canvas, 2009 2000 x 800mm Proceeds raised from the auction of this work will go to the artist’s individual project for Venice
3
Tony Fomison I Was a Teenage Werewolf
oil on canvas on board signed and dated 19 – 29. 6. 70 inscribed “I was a teenage werewolf” film 1957 Exhibited : ‘Fomison: What shall we tell them?’, City Gallery, Wellington (touring), 1994 Illustrated: Ian Wedde (ed), Fomison: What shall we tell them? (City Gallery, Wellington, 1994), p. 9. Reference : Ian Wedde, ‘Tracing Tony Fomison’, in ibid., p. 9 – 10. : ibid., p. 50. : Denis Gifford, A Pictorial History of Horror Movies (London, 1973), p. 9. Provenance: Purchased by the current owner from CSA Gallery, Christchurch in 1970. : Private collection, Christchurch. 330 x 232mm
$18 000 - $28 000
4
Stephen Bambury The Rhythem of his Truth
acrylic and resin on two aluminium panels title inscribed, signed and dated 2001 verso 608 x 650mm: each panel 1216 x 650mm: overall Provenance: Private collection, Auckland
important paintings + sculpture
$20 000 - $30 000
11
5
Shane Cotton Journey in Four Parts: One Horsepower
acrylic on canvas 700 x 1000mm Exhibited : ‘Shane Cotton: Survey 1993 – 2003’, City Gallery, Wellington 17 July – 19 October 2003 (touring). Illustrated : Lara Strongman (ed), Shane Cotton (Wellington, 2004), p. 85.
: Art News New Zealand, Spring 2001, cover.
$35 000 - $45 000
F
rom the moment Shane Cotton burst onto the New Zealand art scene in the early 1990s his work has been soaked in historic, cosmological, and artistic reference points and clues. These clues can be by turns symbolic, literal, sly, bewildering or confronting. His finest work presents as a conceptual crossword with Cotton the quizmaster asking the question, ‘can you crack this code?’ If you haven’t done a bit of homework you can feel a bit of a dunce, but that is the point, you need to work hard to keep up with these works. They can be read, but as the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But knowledge is power because Cotton is addressing the tough stuff of New Zealand’s history. In Cotton’s hands the story of Aotearoa is a midden in a blender: a post-colonial melange of trades and appropriations but also the odd revelation or as he has described it, ‘collision and collusion’. The reading can be taxing, but also full of illuminating surprises. 1994’s Picture Painting had me flummoxed until I connected the cosmic flower as a direct quoting from Gordon Walters’ Chrysanthemum of 1944. Remember, this was at the same time that Dick Frizzell’s Grocer with Moko was stirring the pot and in the aftermath of the Headlands debate over just who ‘owns’ indigenous imagery and in particular designs such as moko or koru which could be attributed to indigenous visual cultures. It cuts both ways Cotton seems to be saying and many of his symbols can be decoded by reference to a multiplicity of texts and sources. Curator Lara Strongman describes this jazzy, freeform approach in her essay from the Cotton’s Survey exhibition of 2003,’The entwined eels, for example which first appear in his works from late 1997, are not only a Ngapuhi tribal form but one of the world’s most ancient visual symbols of infinity: the serpent swallowing its own tail appears in artforms as diverse as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Anglo-Saxon metalwork.’ Journey in 4 Parts: One Horsepower from 2001 presents us with a striking image in the form of the white horse operating as a symbol with any number of readings. A quick reference to the 21st century decoder Google and one can find that the white horse entered the lexicon of symbols more than three thousand years before Christ at Elam in present day Iraq (now there’s a sly reference). A classical reading sees the horse as a civilizing influence but a more sinister one could be the pale horse, Death’s steed, from the Book of Revelations. This particular canvas is from the series Blackout Movement of 2001, within which Cotton explored the intermingling of Christianity, Maori spiritual beliefs and tribal identity that emerged around the Northland Prophet Papahurihia or Te Atua Wera, a figure of great significance to Ngapuhi, from whence Cotton traces his tribal descent. The cinematic quality of this painting, the rare literalism in the use of the horse as an easily deciphered symbol and the journey of the title all coalesce to create a sense of destiny and an air of quiet hopefulness bathes this work: a new dawn brings fresh promise.
important paintings + sculpture
HAMISH CONEY
13
N
o local artist has been more aware of, and more preoccupied by the history of colonialism than Ralph Hotere. He is the artist as member of a minority people: the dispossessed, the culturally marginalised Maori. At the same time of course, he is an accomplished modernist artist, acknowledged internationally as one of New Zealand’s most significant and successful art practitioners. Tracing the fault lines of biculturalism is a task fraught with ironies and complications, but it’s also one which has energised and added an extra dimension to, Hotere’s art-making, as for example in the 1989 clash at Port Chalmers when the artist held out against Port Otago Limited’s various attempts to acquire land on which the artist’s studio was located, as part of logging and container port redevelopment plans. Hotere stated at the time that he did not so much object to the loss of his studio — though it had an unrivalled view down Otago Harbour to Aramoana — as to the loss of a distinctive landmark, and the removal of formerly tapu land: “I am totally opposed to the landscape being treated in such a callous manner. (The developers) are insensitive. They don’t care about history or sentiment or the land.” Oputae (1989) is one of a series of works produced in 1989, and the years following, about the loss of the end of the headland, known as Observation Point. Around this time PROP, or the Preservation of Observation Point, became a nationally-known protest movement, at least amongst conservation and artistic circles. Beyond this, Hotere made art intended to memorialise the location and mourn its destruction. (The land was eventually acquired and used for harbour reclamation and wharf expansion.) One meaning of Oputae is ‘the place of flowers’, and other works in this series are inscribed with the phrase “Oputae — blue gums and daisies falling.” But Observation Point was also known to iwi as Araite Uru Murihiku, that is, it was a pa site and a burial ground. Oputae is a rectangular work made out of ‘baby iron’ — in other words out of a sheet of stainless steel which has been ‘crimped’ into corrugations — and framed in weathered, recycled timber. The artist has then laid on with a blowtorch, coaxing imagery forth from the metal by skilfully deploying flame in the manner of a paintbrush. Some of this imagery is familiar from Maori religious iconography — the arch of a rainbow, a blobby T-shaped cross, a heart shape surmounted by the Christian cross — while ‘CUT’ and horizontal stripes denote the land marked for bulldozing. Four leadheaded nails, one in each corner, function as exclamation points. And burnishing the corrugated steel with oxy-acetylene-gas-fuelled heat, Hotere makes it sing with colours: yellow, blue, bronze, gold. Scrupulous as ever, subtracting from the work everything inessential, Hotere makes the dumb metal eloquent: it’s like a gate or part of a wall that failed to hold back a land grab, but which has itself become a precious remnant of the lost cause. 6 David Eggleton
Ralph Hotere Oputae
blowtorch on corrugated baby iron signed and dated ’89 and inscribed CUT 1989 700 x 640mm Provenance: Private collection, Dunedin
$65 000 - $85 000
15
important paintings + sculpture
7
Bill Hammond Head Set I and II
acrylic on wallpaper, two panels title inscribed, signed and dated 1989 on each panel 1912 x 1040mm overall Provenance: Private Collection, South Island
$38 000 - $50 000
8
Dale Frank Abandoned
varnish on linen signed verso; original Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso 1600 x 1200mm
important paintings paintings important + sculpture sculpture +
$22 000 - $30 000
17 17
9
I
n 1964, inspired by a contemporary exhibition of the work of William Hodges, the painter who accompanied Cook on his second voyage to Waterfall the South Pacific, Colin McCahon began a series of Waterfall paintings enamel on plywood panel that when finished he declared numbered in the hundreds. (However, signed and dated Aug – Sept. ’64 according to the McCahon Database and Image Library far fewer than a Exhibited :‘Small Landscapes and Waterfalls’ Ikon Gallery, Auckland, 1964 hundred remain today). A McCahon ‘waterfall’ typically was an elemental Provenance :Private collection, Auckland white column of falling water, often viewed from an angle so it appeared to Reference :Colin McCahon database silently curve its way through the darkness sometimes to end in a stylized (www.mccahon.co.nz) CM001396 1365 x 915mm body of water at its base. For the most part, these paintings were small $250 000 - $350 000 compositions on hardboard, approximately thirty centimetres square, and they were also based in part, as McCahon was to acknowledge to several of their purchasers, on specific waterfalls in the Waitakere regional park such as the Fairy Falls, Kitekite Falls, Karekare Falls, and Waitakere Falls. Waterfall (1964) is very spare and dark and has a rudimentary duality. It is also an important companion of the large waterfall painting now found in the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki and the almost identical sized Waterfall with Overhanging Red Rock of the Waikato Museum of Art and History Te Whare Taonga o Waikato. The white of the stylized arc of falling water that curves away from a hidden source both divides and articulates a void. At the very top three dark and ochre segments suggest a geometry of geology. Lower on the right a brown rounded square of flat-textured paint intimates a cliffside. The background of the west coast landscape of dense forest and rock is now reduced to a primeval blackness, none of its details may be properly discerned and there is no geographical marker of a horizon line. Indeed, the shapes of the downward coursing water and the ochre buttress rock face are reduced to still, silent abstract forms. Missing, too, is the pool into which the waterfall pours. A thick white line, overpainted in brown, extends down into the composition from the lower right as if it were touched (by the artist’s brush, or hand of God?) from the outside. Countless visible black brushstrokes and puddling of paint over the right and left hand surfaces exist incidentally, not standing for anything other than contingent sensation, and they are seemingly superfluous to the image’s stark symbolic content. The central waterfall feature of the composition looks like some giant upturned woodworker’s tool. This ‘figure’ may also be contracted to a symbolic form for it also reminds us of an inverse tau cross. Gordon Brown referred to the Waterfalls as “symbolic shorthand” and perhaps there is also something of the edge of an enormously large painted letter in the ‘grapheme’ of the water’s white cascade. McCahon wrote that “Waterfalls fell and raged and became as still silent falls of light for a long time. I look back with joy on taking a brush of white paint and curving through the darkness with a line of white.” This painting is a magnificent example of his passion for the New Zealand landscape and his delight in the craft and history of painting. LAURENCE SIMMONS
important paintings paintings important + sculpture sculpture +
Colin McCahon
19
10
Max Gimblett Mirror - The Active Door
mixed media on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1983/89 verso 305 x 505 x 65mm
$7000 - $9000
11
Dick Frizzell Troika
oil on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 9/5/95 500 x 500mm
$8000 - $12 000
12
Don Driver Technic
mixed media title inscribed, signed and dated 1982 1690 x 1200mm Provenance: purchased by the current owner from the artist’s studio
$14 000 - $18 000
13
Ted (Edward) Bullmore Plan 1
mixed media title inscribed and signed verso 700 x 470 x 95mm Provenance: Private collection, Wellington
important paintings + sculpture
$8000 - $12 000
21
14 John Pule I Had a Mind as Invisible as Light, My Hands Spent One Day as an Angel and for Thirty Five Years I Had Hair as Wonderful as the Sun oil and ink on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 2001 and variously inscribed 2000 x 1800mm Provenance: Private collection, Auckland
$45 000 - $65 000
L
ike minds adrift in an ocean of consciousness, John Pule’s islandscapes are linked by tenuous filaments of interconnected human endeavour. With a hand as light as vision itself, delicate as a flying fish wing, sure as a frigate bird in flight, Pule conjures an entire world from the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Emblems, stamps, insignia of cultures and creeds, appear and disappear, only to emerge again in new locations and alternative guises. Lines are cast between landfalls, portage of human activity, formal and domestic, is conducted across perilous tightropes, up and down ladders of chance and fate, the precious baggage of colonization dearly tendered by a multitude of tiny hands. This work is among the most fully resolved and satisfying of a series of large, square-format canvases Pule created between 2000 and 2003. Here the more concentrated figurative explorations of his prolific line drawing and printmaking are placed literally within the broader canvas of his encompassing world view. Pule is master of an enormous floating vocabulary of images that metamorphose, as quickly as we try to pin them down to their cultures of origin, into other figures of differing cultural accent. Thus a Deposition of Christ, as perfectly articulated as a renaissance engraving, reappears in altered form as the ceremonial laying out of a new hiapo or Nuiean tapa cloth. Pule is rarely content to stay within the precise confines of one language or visual tradition, preferring instead to play among the interstices of cultures, to use similarities to show regional differences, all with a deftness of touch that honours the sunlit promise of this magnificent work’s boldly autobiographical title.
Oliver Stead
important important paintings paintings + + sculpture sculpture
The self-reference of the title and other inscriptions anchor these floating images in reality. While suffused with nostalgia which is both personal (recalling the artist’s emigration from Niue to New Zealand in early childhood), and literary (in the depth of historical allusion among the interconnected figures), this Pacific vision is by no means entirely comfortable. The cloud islands, so reminiscent of the puffy clouds of the Pacific trade winds, are tinted red, not blue and white, and suggest blood sacrifice, perhaps even nuclear tests. Their trailing vines suggest both the genetic bloodlines of the peoples that have traversed from island to island, and the stinging tentacles of the Portuguese mano’war jellyfish, that ubiquitous emblem of oceanic travel and its many perils.
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15
Bill Hammond Mountaineering Home Sick Blues
acrylic and enamel on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1985 500 x 805mm Provenance: Private collection, lower North Island
$25 000 - $35 000
H
ammond’s paintings of the mid 1980s remind me of a busker doing it tough. Aucklanders may remember the Singing Cowboy who plied his trade on Queen Street in the mid 1980s. He could be found furiously strumming the open strings of a battered guitar and mangling the words to whatever song lyric, radio jingle, sea shanty or misquoted snatch of doggerel he managed to summon up from the depths of his semi-consciousness. Mountaineering Homesick Blues would have been right up his apples and pears. In Hammond’s hands this misquoting of the Bob Dylan classic is depicted as a bewildering collision of visual and psychic symbolism. The pop culture palette of bubblegum pink, custard yellow and cheap silver becomes a metaphor for amped up unease and as unique a visual signifier of Hammond’s worldview as the never-ending greens of his later Auckland Island related paintings from the mid 1990s. In the mid 1980s what Hammond concocted was the idea of painting as the soundtrack for the not so brave new world of free-market economics, consumer culture and body angst that defined the ‘greed is good’ decade. In this work our homesick bluesman is laid out on a dining table and menaced by advancing minibars, his only route of escape cut off by an oil torrent containing a quizzical selection of Cluedo style symbols: an umbrella, a tap, a cocktail glass and a lonesome shoe. In the background a volcano looks set to blow. It presents as a Dante-esque vision of contemporary angst, but Hammond inverts this reading into a pantomime scene through the merging of interior and exterior spaces, cracked perspective and the maladroit placement of objects from his own clip-art library: the concrete lattice work, bad haircut and cheesy details that decorate the living rooms of Hammondsville circa 1985. In terms of picture design Hammond at this time quotes directly from the then new media forms of the rock video and the video game and in this he is presaging both the virtual worlds and hammy set ups and that abound today in reality TV. Just out of shot the artist sits as a deranged director creating ever nuttier b-movie scenarios into which he hurls the hapless ‘contestants’. How they (we) survive, thrive or nosedive is what makes these hard rockin’ paintings so compelling.
important paintings + sculpture
hamish coney
25
17
Paul Dibble David
cast bronze, edition of 5 signed and dated 1999 553 x 205 x 165mm
$9000 - $13 000
18
Guy Ngan Habitation
cast bronze and wood impressed signature 400 x 183 x 122mm
$5000 - $7000
16
Terry Stringer Untitled - Female Study cast bronze, 2/3 signed and dated ’99 400 x 80 x 80mm
$4500 - $6500
19
Terry Stringer Bronze II - Wall Series
oil on bronze and aluminium signed and dated ’87 1090 x 1200 x 130mm
$16 000 - $24 000
20
Paul Dibble Provisions for a Long Journey
$19 000 - $26 000
important important paintings paintings + + sculpture sculpture
cast bronze, edition of 4 signed and dated 2002 635 x 535 x 140mm Exhibited: ‘Norsewear Art Awards’, Hastings, 2002 (guest artist) Provenance: Private Collection, South Island
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21
Paul Dibble The Fall
cast bronze, 1/3 title inscribed, signed and dated ’94 1700 x 970 x 275mm Reference: Jeanette Cook (ed), Paul Dibble (Auckland, 2001), p.120.
$27 000 - $35 000
22
Ann Robinson cast glass signed and dated 2002 and inscribed No. 18 547 x 547 x 200mm
$40 000 - $50 000
important important paintings paintings + + sculpture sculpture
Wide Bowl
29 29
T
he dawn of the new millennium heralded a new-found freedom for sculptor Paul Dibble. With a foundry and studio in Palmerston North, a team of highly-trained assistants in place and a more regular income from an increasingly appreciate audience, the artist set about further investigating the limits of his age-old medium of choice, bronze. Conceived in the previous year to the artist’s Hyde Park Memorial (2005) commission in London, the Soft Geometric series presented audiences with a shift towards a simpler, cleaner and more homogenous formal template. The dramatic formal shift did not represent a clean break however. Numerous narrative strains have remained a constant throughout the artist’s impressive oeuvre and the cool, restrained formal elegance of the Soft Geometric works recalled the elongated limbs and torsos of his Long Horizon works as well as the recurring Nautilus Shell, not to mention further reflecting Dibble’s obvious lifelong engagement with New Zealand and Polynesian history. Soft Geometric Medium Series 2, No.1 references both Maori and European history, providing a touchstone to the International Modernist sculpture of Arp, Brancusi and Moore whilst closer to home recalling the bi-cultural vernacular of Theo Schoon and, more especially, Gordon Walters. Like Walters’ Koru paintings, negative space is as integral to the composition and the experience of viewing the work as positive form. From some angles the work appears solid and dense, from others the sharply outlined shapes serve to lighten the sculpture teasing the eye from the three dimensional corporeal mass to make it appear as a silhouette. To sculpt in bronze, an inflexible and anachronistic medium burdened with history, is a generous and brave act in the face of an increasingly relentless and temporal society, fixated on the here and now. That Dibble’s cast bronze sculptures give us cause to pause and reflect in these busy times is something for which we should all be grateful. BEN PLUMBLY
23
Paul Dibble cast bronze, edition of 2 signed and dated 2004 2000 x 1000 x 465mm Illustrated : Jeanette Cook (ed), Paul Dibble (Auckland, 2001), p. 199. Exhibited : ‘Sculpture on the Shore’, Auckland, 2004
$65 000 - $85 000
important important paintings paintings + + sculpture sculpture
Soft Geometric Medium Series 2, No.1
31 31
24
Colin McCahon Bather No. 3
pen and ink on paper signed and dated ’43; title inscribed, signed and inscribed 8 Espin Cres, Karori, Wellington verso 132 x 110mm Provenance : private collection, Auckland Reference : Colin McCahon database (www.mccahon.co.nz) CM001614
$10 000 - $15 000
25
Colin McCahon Bathers No. 4
pen and ink on paper signed and dated ’43; title inscribed, signed and inscribed 8 Espin Cres, Karori, Wellington verso 110 x 122mm Exhibited :‘The Group Exhibition’, Ballantynes Store, Christchurch, 1943 Provenance : private collection, Auckland Reference : Colin McCahon database (www.mccahon.co.nz) CM001311
$10 000 - $15 000
26
Richard Killeen Welcome to the South Seas
acrylic on paper title inscribed, signed and dated 22/10/79 570 x 375mm
$4000 - $6000
27
Philip Clairmont Portait of Tony Fomison
ink and watercolour on paper signed with artist’s initials C. T and dated ’69 and inscribed Tony F. Exhibited :‘Fomison: What shall we tell them?’, City Gallery, Wellington, 1994 Provenance : Private collection, Christchurch 420 x 460mm
$4500 - $6500
28
Colin McCahon North from Mt. Atkinson
$6000 - $8000
important paintings + sculpture
ink on paper signed and dated ’57 208 x 275mm Provenance : Private collection, Auckland
33
H
ardly anything expresses the depth and diversity of the human species more than our faces do; every face is unique and each is a testament to the life of an individual. Yet the skull, the canvas on which these stories are laid, is the face’s very antithesis. Its uniform hollows and cavities gawp not at meaning, but at nothingness. In his Detail for a Dancing Skeleton Tony Fomison presents an x-ray image of life, reminding us of what lies beneath its painted surface. The skull is a universal symbol almost as old as humankind, a cipher for mortality which may be colourfully celebrated as it is in the Day of the Dead festivals in Latin America, or mourned as reminder of time’s relentless march. Anyone even vaguely familiar with western art history might see in this work a nod to those haunted Northern European paintings in which skulls are memento mori, either clutched in the arms of saints or given more sober consideration in still-life vanitas studies. Yet the dancing skeleton which Fomison commits to canvas has rather more theatrical origins in the spectacular passion plays found throughout Europe from the time of the Black Plague. Here death played the role of God’s messenger, summoning the folk to a life eternal but at the same time warning them they would have to meet their maker. In the same way that passion plays sought to address the audience of their day, Fomison’s dancing skeleton is sourced from popular culture - a simple fact recorded in the artist’s spidery-hand in the top right-hand corner of the work. In actual fact this eerie cranium is the product of an advertisement for ‘the world famous Magnajector’, a magic lantern projector featured in the cult American film magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. The Magnajector promises to ‘throw huge images on the wall’ demonstrating the effect with the photographic forerunner of Fomison’s painting. The choreutoscope, a type of magic lantern slide invented in 1866, is sometimes considered the first modern animation device. Using a shutter mechanism, it was able to produce the impression of movement from a sequence of engravings, the most popular of which was a skeleton who performed a Dance Macabre as the slides were cranked through the shutter. In the trajectory of performative storytelling from theatre to film, the skeleton, that spectre of death, has always both horrified and thrilled audiences with its tragicomic form. In his Detail for a Dancing Skeleton Fomison arrests the spectre and considers it anew, showing us that visual symbols like the skull have the power to speak to us about hidden truths, whether or not we choose to look beneath their surface for further meaning. PENNIE HUNT 29
Tony Fomison Detail for a Dancing Skeleton
oil on hessian in artist’s original frame title inscribed, signed and dated 19 – 23. 9. 70, 20 – 26. 10. 70, 2 – 4. 11. 70, 15.12. 70 and inscribed from Magic Lantern advert for Famous Monsters of Filmland Comic; original Fomison catalogue exhibition label affixed verso Provenance : Purchased by the current owner from Elva Bett Gallery, Wellington in 1973. : Private collection, Christchurch Illustrated : Ian Wedde (ed), Fomison: What shall we tell them? (City Gallery, Wellington, 1994), p. 113. Exhibited : ‘Fomison: What shall we tell them?’, City Gallery, Wellington (touring), 1994 : ‘Coming Home in the Dark’, October 15 2004 – March 27 2005, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu. 620 x 887mm
$90 000 - $130 000
35 35
important important paintings paintings + + sculpture sculpture
Louise Henderson The Three Bathers
oil and pastel on canvas signed and dated 1974; signed and dated verso Provenance: Private collection, Auckland 1660 x 1200mm
$50 000 - $70 000
M
oving to Auckland in 1950 after studying at Victoria University College and having her first solo exhibition at Wellington Public Library, Louise Henderson (nee Sauze) began to paint full time. It was around this time, influenced by John Weeks, that she moved away from the regionalist concerns she had previously explored in Christchurch and took an interest in cubism. Henderson was daughter to the secretary for French sculptor August Rodin and in 1952 she returned to her home town of Paris to study cubism first-hand under Jean Metzinger where, thirty years earlier, she had studied embroidery design. She became an important force in furthering the cubist style in New Zealand and what appeared to local eyes as a radical Modernist approach was a feature of exhibitions at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1953 and 1954. First arriving in New Zealand in 1925 to marry teacher Hubert Henderson, she took a part-time position teaching embroidery and design at Canterbury College School of Fine Arts. As Vivien Caughley notes in the latest Art New Zealand (#130), Henderson wrote books and established curriculums for embroidery and design that have left a lasting legacy in the field of arts education. While in Christchurch, she took up painting, going on sketching trips to places like Cass with Rita Angus in the late 1930s. Biographer Elizabeth Grierson notes a cultured upbringing (her maternal grandfather had been a painter and under-secretary to the Minister for culture) but that her parents had discouraged her from becoming an artist. Moving to New Zealand provided a liberating lifestyle, although her family also emigrated in the 1930s, creating commitments that saw reduced her output in the 1940s. After relocating to Auckland via Wellington, she continued to travel widely, spending the late 1950s in the Middle East while her husband worked with UNESCO, teaching in Sydney in 1961 and travelling to Europe with an exhibition of her work, resulting in a rich set of international influences and a strong sense of her New Zealand context, evident in such works as her Jerusalem series and her Polynesian portraits. Hubert died in 1963 and a devastated Henderson threatened to sell-up and quit painting but Auckland City Art Gallery director Peter Tomory persuaded her to continue, resulting in a lyrical outpouring of improvised works. In the 1970s, her attention turned to the distinct light and damp foliage of the Pacific, producing paintings of the New Zealand bush and Polynesian scenes from Rarotonga.
Also producing tapestries, mosaics and commissions for stained glass windows, Henderson’s interdisciplinary interests and ability to shift between media made her an ideal candidate to exhibit at the New Vision Gallery, where founders Kees and Tine Hos made a point of combining painting, ceramics and printmaking and endeavoured to educate the public on abstraction, presenting important shows for the likes of Theo Schoon and Gordon Walters. This range of influences is evident in The Three Bathers, painted in the year she was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand fellowship. A sense of her European roots can be detected in a composition that recalls the exoticism of Picasso or Gaugin, but as a seasoned and sensitive observer of cultures with a life spent in the Southern Hemisphere, it is a Pacific eye that bears witness. The soft layering of light over her arrangement of gently faceted planes betray her design sensibilities while the kaleidoscopic interplay of remains constant and confident, whether working in pure abstraction or in more figurative settings such as this. Andrew Clifford
important paintings paintings important + sculpture sculpture +
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Bill Hammond Flag
acrylic on unstretched canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1997 1410 x 2130mm Provenance: Private collection, Auckland. Purchased by the current owner from Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington in 1997.
$240 000 - $320 000
T
he story of Bill Hammond’s inspirational trip to the Auckland Islands in 1991 is well known. How the islands showed him “a New Zealand before there were men, women, dogs and possums.” How the 19th century ornithological book ‘Buller’s Birds’ – which is populated with illustrations of many bird species that have not survived to the present – provided part of his visual vocabulary. And since then, how Hammond has imagined himself in that New Zealand, before people arrived, through the surreal paintings he developed of birds-becomingpeople. His dystopian birds have watched over forests and coastlines; waited for Buller’s return; witnessed the exfoliation of trees and the extinction of species; and communed among themselves. So, seeing flags – so festive! – fluttering against the sticky green of Hammond’s 1997 painting just confuses me. I don’t know what these theatrically animated flag waving birds mean. I can’t explain them. All I can do is copy the semaphore gestures, which seem to spell ‘despair.’ Plant a flag: claim a territory. Hoist a flag: celebrate a victory, announce a party. Flutter a pennant: declare your Mana, hurl a challenge. But raise a red flag? Warn of danger? Where: all around us? In the middle of the painting there is a green and black brocade-skinned bird holding aloft a shield with a bleeding heart; and below this, a winged messenger. What portent are they flagging? Are they flagging something, or simply flagging? What is it to flag? To flag hoists all sorts of down-beats into the swampy air: to give away; to give up; to tire; to give in. And there, in the upper right quadrant of the painting, next to the bleeding heart, is a large pale grey, striding bird-becoming-man, doing what? Is he throwing in the towel? Has it all become too much to bear anymore? I don’t know. This not knowing is the point I think.
Flag is a painting to drown in. Its power lies beneath its glossy surface of festive fluttering, suffocating sap-like green and ornate gold, rich red wounds and trees disported like wrought-iron Chinese filigree barring a window. Its power lies in the mysterious fact that this suppurating world looks so frightening – unavoidable and unknowable – and beautiful at the same time. Rob Garrett
important paintings paintings important + sculpture sculpture +
In our land with so many flightless native birds, the picture of earth-bound birds with human bodies seems as ordinary and everyday as it is fantastical. I can imagine not being startled or surprised, if – when walking through the dripping, dark green wet bush of Fiordland – I found myself walking stride for stride next to one of Hammond’s birds. But if I did find myself walking next to one of these birds I might fear for my life, at least for my sanity. It would feel as if I had slipped through a slime hole – worm hole is wrong, being too extraterrestrial, whereas Hammond’s birds inhabit a swamp-world before memory. His bird demigods and their glossy dribbling green world want to suck us back beneath the presentday and into the primordial – water-logged earth, oozing tree sap and rank birds’ gullets – and prevent us taking flight. I would feel as if I had slipped into the realm of torment and dark mutilation conjured so well by Hammond’s contemporary – in this moment when time and space slip-slide with each other – Hieronymus Bosch.
39 39
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Bill Hammond Fly
acrylic on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1999 542 x 405mm Provenance: Private Collection, South Island
$50 000 - $70 000
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”
J
L.J.P Hartley
ust when did New Zealand’s artists decide to turn their gaze on the past? Perhaps when they realised we had one. Much of New Zealand’s modern art history could be articulated as a headlong rush into the future. If the 19th Century was all about the NOW as fresh of the boat artists recalibrated their anglicized specs to a more rugged and tumescent reality, then the story of the 20th Century was all about the new, the moderne. Our artists struggled to keep up with the breakneck developments of post impressionism regionalism, modernism and the urgent need to find a distinct national voice. By the time the 1980s hove into view we’d had two hundred years of attempting to locate the brave new dawn and then along came Bill Hammond. ‘Last, loneliest and loveliest. Exquisite, apart…’, was how Rudyard Kipling described New Zealand in 1890s and this tone of mournful grandeur informed by isolation is an apt text to carry with us as we approach a painting such as Fly from 1999. From the early 1990s Hammond has focused his acute powers of observation on New Zealand’s history and like the great Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez his chosen style can be described as Magic Realism. After an eon of solitude in the foreign country that is Godzone’s past a hybridization of the species has taken place. Curator Ron Brownson describes this process in his catalogue essay for the 2007 retrospective exhibition Jingle Jangle Morning, ‘…Hammond’s paintings have imagined New Zealand’s history as a fabled zone populated with spectacular creatures. These mythic beings may once have been humans, or extinct birds, or horses, but their origins have been reworked and they have morphed into crossbreeds.’ Brownson describes these figures as humaniforms and as we see in Fly they are curious creatures indeed. Their genus extends deep into past mythologies and the times of Icarus, gryphons and unicorns. This is a time when life on earth was seen as miraculous, extraordinary and scarcely within the ambit of language to describe. That Hammond proposes such incredulities for a New Zealand history is tinged with sadness. Those days of fertile abundance and plenty are long past. Since mankind first touched our shores such diversity has increasingly gone the way of the moa, the huia and Sceloglaux albifacies the Laughing Owl. In the half light of Fly Hammond has conjured a long-lost moment where a man-bird might tutor a bird-man in art of flight. Could Kipling or even Garcia Marquez have imagined a scene of such tender beauty?
important paintings paintings important + sculpture sculpture +
HAMISH CONEY
41 41
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Gordon Walters Study for Rewa
ink on paper title inscribed, signed and dated ’81 and inscribed 10 – 04 – 81 760 x 570mm Provenance: Private collection, lower North Island
$60 000 - $80 000
G
ordon Walters’ Study for Rewa (1981) is one of the artist’s most restrained, and yet effective, designs from his celebrated Koru series. First exhibited in 1966, some fifteen years previous, the artist was by the early 1980s moving towards a greater clarity and sense of formal order in his compositions. Walters remarked of his practice: “My work is an investigation of positive/negative relationships within a deliberately limited range of forms… I believe that dynamic relations are most clearly expressed by the repetition of a few simple elements”. The recurring ‘elements’ in the Koru series were as little as a line, often terminating in a bulb, and a circle. Study for Rewa features two terminating Koru bulbs meeting in the top left corner and in the bottom right corner a single black bulb abruptly meets a circle. In between, alternate bands of black and white spread horizontally across the page. Such a blandly descriptive account of the work – what theorists might refer to as ekphrasis, the process of transferring literally what the eye sees or reads into words – does little to convey the complexity of any real engagement with this work, the rich cultural and aesthetic associations with traditional Maori art and Oceanic aesthetics, and the intricate, refined precision of the artist’s working method. Walter’s works on paper were central to his practice and working method. Moreoften than not the artist would begin a design with a prepatory papier collé before producing a work on paper and then lastly a fully-realized painting on canvas or board. Both the papier collé’s and the works on paper serve to lay bare the artist’s fastidious technique in a wonderfully illuminating manner which his paintings conceal. The artist abandoned free-hand painting in his Koru works as early as 1961 and the drawn pencil lines and barely-visible pricks of the compass, which only reveal themselves upon close inspection, serve as wonderful testimonies to Walters’ unwavering exactitude as well as crucial reminders that the artist’s earliest training was in the realm of commercial art rather than fine art.
important paintings + sculpture
BEN PLUMBLY
43
R
alph Hotere is no remote, impersonal object-maker. He’s a sleeves-rolled-up artisan, a romantic in the full-blooded sense of the word, committed to an old-fashioned idealism or humanism. His paintings and sculptures display a confident mastery of industrial materials, and prove him a magician of metaphor.
Hotere began using brand-new stainless steel sheets in the early 1980s, and he established his ability to make this material resonant and evocative with the Baby Iron series in 1983. Early in 1984, he exhibited a closely-related series of works entitled 1984, at the Robert McDougall Gallery in Christchurch as part of a Christchurch Festival group show called Paperchase: Exhibition of Works on Paper. 1984 consisted of 12 panels — essentially wall-hung assemblages — incorporating large sheets of high-grade paper stuck onto a stainless steel surface. The work inscribed (in orange paint) with the phrase ‘Nineteen eighty four’, as well as the artist’s signature the words “Port Chalmers” and the date “83 - 84”, is from this 1984 series. Boxed in by its emphatic wooden frame (constructed by Hotere’s co-worker Roger Hicken from salvaged and weathered farm timber) the work can be seen as a minimalist geometric form: a square subdivided into a patterning of rectangles and oblongs, and dominated by a T-shaped cross motif. But if the work is formally reductive in the classic Hotere manner, it is also characteristically rich in allusiveness, fulfilling the artist’s aims made in one of his few public statements about what his art is seeking to do, namely: “to provide for the spectator a starting point which, when contemplated, may become a nucleus revealing scores of new possibilities.” Hotere’s carefully measured treatment unveils beauty in the greyish surface of stainless steel, giving it a silky, silvery sheen. Bent, buckled and buffed, steel’s reflective properties are channelled and managed by the opaque paper embossments, and by a swirl of burr-marks made with the sanding disc of an angle-grinder. So while on one level it is an exercise in formal resolution, on another, shape-shifting light — dancing ambiguously across the surface — is intended to make you wary of the work’s focal depths: this is art about power — political as well as aesthetic. The date ‘1984’ pays homage to George Orwell’s famous eponymous novel (written in 1948) about the dangers of totalitarianism, but it also marks the anti-nuclear protests of 1984 — both against US nuclear-powered warships cruising Pacific waters and French nuclear testing near Tahiti. Look again at the central column of the T-shape and you begin to see how this might symbolise the ocean: a fast-moving squall or water-spout out at sea, or even some undersea force pushing upwards — a submarine-launched nuclear missile. The agitated middle section — composed of scribbled metal, ripped paper and flurried paintwork (the colours of fire, oil, and turbulent seawater) establish why those polished reflections to each side are so unstable. This is an anxious time, ruled by uncertainty, and that smudged black bar at the top of the column — a line on the horizon — might be New Zealand as a vulnerable waka. David Eggleton 34
Ralph Hotere Nineteen Eighty Four
acrylic and paper on burnished steel in original Roger Hickin frame title inscribed, signed and dated ’83 – ’84 770 x 770mm Exhibited :‘Paperchase’, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, 1984 Provenance : Private collection, Auckland
$80 000 - $120 000
45
important paintings + sculpture
T
he South Canterbury plains, formed from moraine gravels deposited during glacial periods, merge with the plains of North Otago just beyond the Waitaki River. This is an area of moderately intensive livestock grazing but also one prone to droughts. The prevailing foehn wind from the northwest, a weather phenomenon referred to as the Nor’west arch, regularly dries out the surface of the land and raises temperatures to over thirty degrees. “The plains are nameless … By the pine windbreak where the hot wind bleeds,” McCahon’s friend Charles Brasch wrote in his poem ‘The Silent Land’. The stubborn, almost singular, experience of living on a flat plain without points of reference heightens the experience of disruption between the sky and the landforms and produces disorientation. McCahon spent much of his early life cycling through this landscape in search of seasonal work. The concept of landscape that dominates Western art history is one irresolutely focused on pictorial representation; the landscape is something to be seen at a distance, framed often by a set of conventions, but not to be touched or felt. However, in South Canterbury (1968) McCahon presents us, I would argue, with a different experience and affect — an animated image. In his brilliant yellow expanse of sky we feel, almost palpably, the heat of the Canterbury nor’wester. In the bright vibrant green of the vegetation, with its hint of the characteristic patchwork grid of farm paddocks edged by windbreak trees, we rejoice in the working over of the fertility of local soils. All of which goes to prove a landscape is also what cultural historian Michel de Certeau called a ‘practiced place’, a site activated by movements, narratives, actions, labour and signs. LAURENCE SIMMONS
35
Colin McCahon polyvinyl acetate and sand on board signed and dated July ’68; title inscribed, signed and dated verso Provenance : gifted by the artist to the current owner’s parents in 1969. : private collection, Christchurch. Reference : Colin McCahon database (www.mccahon.co.nz) CM001125 600 x 600mm
$85 000 - $125 000
important importantpaintings paintings ++sculpture sculpture
South Canterbury
47 47
36
Allen Maddox Untitled
oil on canvas title printed on original Gow Langsford Gallery label affixed verso 1200 x 1200mm Provenance: from the artist’s estate : private collection, Auckland
$20 000 - $30 000
37
Allen Maddox (section of a critical essay written by the artist on Coleridge’s Kubla Khan)
oil on cotton title inscribed 1050 x 1780mm Provenance : From the collection of film-writer, director and author Peter Wells who purchased the work in the early 1980s from Denis Cohn Gallery whilst working as Denis’ assistant.
$15 000 - $22 000
important paintings + sculpture
We Climbed off the 9 – 42 from Porirua. I Thought I looked a Typical Commuter but… He Recognised Me!
49
38
Shane Cotton TAI AAI
oil on canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 1997 500 x 610mm Provenance: Private collection, Auckland.
$25 000 - $35 000
39
Shane Cotton Point
oil, encaustic and collage on plywood, diptych signed and dated 1992 on each panel verso 1205 x 290mm each panel 2410 x 290mm overall Provenance: Private Collection, South Island
important paintings + sculpture
$20 000 - $30 000
51
John Pule Taulani
oil on unstretched canvas title inscribed, signed and dated 2003 2020 x 1815mm Provenance: Private Collection, Auckland
$25 000 - $35 000
R
eading between the lines; John Pule’s Taulani. As well as being a visual artist Pule is also the author of the novel titled Burn my Head in Heaven. The conflicts and joys of navigating multiple belief systems; religious, cultural and personal, is at the heart of Pule’s multi-disciplined practice. Given his proficiency in a number of genres it is instructive to enter this canvas via an inscription to be found in the minutiae of the banded colour and pictograms that animate the painting’s surface. As a viewer it may not be one’s instinctive reaction to move closer, indeed the scale of the work demands a distant view to comprehend its grand design. But there amongst the black and blood red striations that set the tone for the work is a tender tableau that suggests a possible reading for this work. Two lovers converse in lyric tongue, ‘It’s nights like this when I can watch you sleep – my eyes are two wings in the belly of a butterfly – only because I know where your tears go at dawn.’ The other figure offering a flower responds, ‘ Your face contains matters of pure aesthetics.’ These secret whisperings and other symbols and statements are hidden between the lines of the work. Peer ever more closely and you will see a church with steeples, a dolphin-like sea creature, even a St. John’s ambulance. Depicted at least four times and on various scales is a classic Pule motif, clouds and islands linked by ladders and stairs. On the cloud side is a welcoming or beckoning figure. It is a simple device to reveal Pule’s connection between the landbased temporal existence of the human world and the heavenly or spiritual realm. The mingling of these vignettes of lovers and spiritual migration within Pule’s overall formal schema is derived from the design traditions of Nuiean hiapo or tapa than creates a universe of symbols and non linear narratives. Pule has created a distinct library of imagery that personalizes his Polynesian and New Zealand experience. The weaving of personal, cultural symbolism and language enables his work to be readily understood or read on a number of levels. For example the vines of the ti mata alea (cordyline tree) that trail beneath the cloud forms are a direct reference to the Niuean belief that all life is originated from this tree. Here they may be read as a metaphor for the immigrant growing in a new land, yet retaining key cultural DNA from his homeland. HAMISH CONEY
important paintings + sculpture
40
53
41
Michael Smither Still Life with Yellow Teapot
oil on board signed with artist’s initials M. D. S and dated ’94 480 x 730mm Provenance: Private collection, Auckland
$25 000 - $35 000
42
Tony Fomison Jester to the Current Court of France
oil on hessian on particle board title inscribed, signed and dated 1981 and inscribed Underpainting, early May, Mars yellow 18.6.81, Blue 25.6.81 verso; Janne Land Gallery blind stamp applied verso 270 x 395mm Provenance: Private collection, Wellington
important importantpaintings paintings ++sculpture sculpture
$24 000 - $32 000
55 55
43
Jude Rae Still Life 20
oil on linen title inscribed, signed and dated ’98 verso 500 x 610mm
$10 000 - $15 000
44
Tony de Lautour X
acrylic on canvas signed and dated 2003 910 x 910mm
$12 000 - $16 000
Stanley Palmer Motu Maraenui
oil on linen signed and dated ’99 1110 x 1360mm
$17 000 - $26 000
important paintings + sculpture
45
57
46
Dick Frizzell Stumps in a River
oil on board title inscribed, signed and dated 28 – 7 – 87 615 x 2420mm
$20 000 - $30 000
47
Max Gimblett For Sengai
acrylic on handmade pulp paper title inscribed, signed and dated ’85 1215 x 905mm
$5000 - $8000
48
Nigel Brown A Man Amongst Yer
oil on canvas, triptych signed and dated ’95; title inscribed, signed and dated verso 1360 x 2070mm Provenance: Private collection, North Shore, Auckland.
$18 000 - $28 000
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important paintings paintings important + sculpture sculpture +
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important
i ndex Bambury, Stephen Brown, Nigel Bullmore, Ted
4 47 13
Clairmont, Philip Cotton, Shane
27 5, 38, 39
de Lautour, Tony 44 Dibble, Paul 17, 20, 21, 23 Driver, Don 12 Fomison, Tony Frank, Dale Frizzell, Dick
3, 29, 42 8 11, 46
Gimblett, Max
10
photographs June 2009
entries invited
Hammond, Bill 7, 15, 31, 32 Henderson, Louise 30 Hotere, Ralph 6, 34 Killeen, Rick
26
Maddox, Allen 36, 37 McCahon, Colin 9, 24, 25, 28, 35 Millar, Judy 2 Ngan, Guy
18
Palmer, Stanley Pule, John
45 14, 40
Rae, Jude Robinson, Ann
43 22
Smither, Michael Stringer, Terry
41 16, 19
Upritchard, Francis
1
Walters, Gordon
33
Peter Peryer Trout
vintage gelatin silver print, 1987
$9000 - $14 000
decorative arts + items of New Zealand interest May 14
Rick Lewis
Anton Seuffert
Kangeroo
Inlaid table top
$1000 - $2000
$18 000 - $24 000
bronze
native NZ timbers
important paintings + sculpture
entries invited
65