RALPH HOTERE
S ELECTED WORKS 1970 - 2005
27 July - 20 August 2024
RALPH HOTERE SELECTED WORKS 1970-2005
Life-long themes of nature and loss, awareness of and fundamental concern about the natural and human-made world, the entwined mutually inclusive presence of Catholicism and the Māori spiritual world, coupled with extraordinary powers of invention and independence of thought underlies all of Ralph Hotere’s work.
Acknowledged as one of the country’s most significant painters, Ralph Hotere Selected Works 1970 – 2005 is the first substantial exhibition of his work since Ātete (to resist).1
Including three important works (X P, Fernando Pereira, and Blue Triptych) from The Hotere Foundation Trust collection, for which we express our deep appreciation and thanks, Ralph Hotere Selected Works 1970 – 2005 contains significant works across a diverse range of media, one of the undoubted hallmarks of Hotere’s career and oeuvre.
1.
The Road to Arles from Avignon (1978) is an outstanding, major work completed in Hotere’s “Ma Ville” outside studio at Arles (where it was pinned to the backing board as he worked on it – see the remnant presence of rounded push pins around the perimeter of the black square). Hotere’s stay in Arles coincided with the deaths of Pope Paul XI (in August) and 33 days later of his successor, John Paul I. In the bottom right area amongst the mottled surface sit three trefoil-shaped gold keys, denoting papal authority and reminiscent of the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Ghost). These are the keys of St. Peter or the keys of heaven, their repetition symbolising binding, loosening and knowledge.2 Above,
the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery Te
2. Linda Tyler, “Ralph Hotere Towards Aramoana,” The Lois Going Collection, Art + Object, 30 March 2023, p. 62.
Ralph Hotere: Ātete (to resist) is a partnership project between
Puna o Waiwhetū.
in a night window-like space, a toppled cross delivered as an incomplete X (denoting Christ and Christianity) diagonally intersects an indeterminate black space. Strikingly multivalent and pluralist, spiritually replete, traversing time and place (encapsulated in the title),3 filled with contemplative solemnity, apocalyptic lyrical beauty and magnificence, The Road from Arles to Avignon is both tragic and searingly triumphant.
Eight years later, in the arresting, emblematic and rhythmic large scale drawing Les Saintes Maries de la Mer (1986) Hotere (back in Port Chalmers) returns to the stories and derived symbols from The Road to Arles from Avignon in his adaptation of the Camargue Cross.4 Strands and ribbons of colour dance about, as if light splitting, the partially hidden words “Black Rainbow” are scrawled below a segmented heart, a cross planted as if on a landscape, an arcing black rainbow edge to edge placed protectively above.
The modified Camargue Cross, embodying the three theological virtues of Christianity (faith, hope and charity), had become a personal motif and a recurring symbol in Hotere’s visual language, blending his humanism, Catholic sacredness, the crucifixion and landscape together. He was of course fully aware that the Saintes Maries de la Mer church was a holy site, that every year continuously since at least 1448 over three days in late May a Gypsy Festival and Christian Pilgrimage occurred, venerating the relics of the Three Marys with each of their statues being taken to the sea, immersed and blessed. Such are the multiple layers in all of Hotere’s work. What might appear at first visually simple and reductive reveals more with every viewing and conversation, as this remarkable drawing demonstrates so well. It is very pertinent to note also that his adaptation of the Camargue Cross became something of a personal motif and was added into the gate at his home at Harbour Terrace, Port Chalmers.5
3. Avignon from 1309-77 being the seat of the Catholic Popes and under papal rule until becoming part of France in 1791.
4. Previously Hotere’s adaptation of this has been identified as sourced from a Gitan (gypsy) emblem. This is not correct. It is the symbol for the French region of Camargue and was created in 1926 by the painter HermanPaul to represent the Camargue nation of herdsmen and fishermen and it appears on the outside wall of the Les Saintes Maries de la Mer Church.
5. See Vincent O’Sullivan, The Dark is Light Enough, Penguin, 2020, p. 243-246.
The Black over the Gold (1992) is from the critically acclaimed Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro series, “the most Catholic of all his works,” steeped in the history of the Catholic Church, “the flickering candlelight of the mass,” and Spain “hovers on the borderline between the world of art and that of tribal history and belief.”6 Hotere “makes black provide elegant riddles, fastidious conundrums,” enabling a “metaphysical voyage into the dark night of the soul, only his art alters the metaphysical to the metaphorical.” He moves the viewer “from dark to light, from absence to presence” and “makes darkness visible.”7
Regarded as amongst his most important works, “Hotere’s gold and black works… highlight his affinity with a tradition that is both elemental and mystical. Hotere’s paintings assert the depth and mystery of all human experience, transcending their maker’s subjectivity to work in an intrinsically objective, universalist way… The opaque surface can hold the most illuminating image. Darkness can be infused with meaning and reflected or refracted light.”8
Winter Solstice (1988) hung in the window of Hotere’s Observation Point studio overlooking Aramoana until the headland and studio were compulsorily acquired by Port Otago. Glass was
6. Kriselle Baker, “He Kuaka Marangaranga: A Godwit that Hovers,” Ralph Hotere, Ron Sang Publications, 2008, p. 130.
7. David Eggleton, “From Absence to Presence,” Ralph Hotere: Black Light, Te Papa Press / Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2000, p. 62-66.
8. Gregory O’Brien, “Tenebrae – Transfigured Night,” Ibid. p. 31.
a key medium he worked with throughout his career and this work is one of the largest. Explicitly referencing the scuttling of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior at Matauri Bay on 12 December 1987, it is also the crucifixion of Christ. Using German float glass for the body (with surface qualities and colour variations akin to kauri gum), it is an abstracted figure with two rainbow-shaped bleeds falling from where the spear wounds would be. The shape of the body and shoulders collectively form a Greek tau cross.
Fernando Pereira (2005) is equally explicit as a requiem for and homage to the Portuguese-Dutch freelance photographer drowned in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour on 10 July 1985. Using his favoured stencilling text in a valedictory and incantatory manner, Hotere uses erasure and scribbling to both hide and reveal, housing all in an arched window frame that intensifies the theological narratives of above (heaven) and below (hell), right and wrong and other such dichotomies.
Black Window, Red Cross (ca 1995) is a stylistically broad work with key elements strongly suggesting its very beginnings were early 1970s as evidenced in the brolite section of the work. Over the top of this, Hotere has placed an etched stainless steel section, fringed with lead-head nails. Incorporating numerous techniques such as painting, erasure, and rolling of the metal (a key feature of the corrugated steel works), at the same time the stainless sheet partially obscures a cross form hovering behind. Conversely, Drawing for a Black Window (1981) is filled with the suggestive
presence of light breaking free and underpainting, and contains joyous, expressive sensations of meditation and the human spirit.
As much as Hotere believed that art’s fundamental role was to examine the human condition with nature itself as the touchstone, he did so with a visual language formed by Catholicism and Te Aupōuri tribal belief. Equally he believed that he had a fundamentally important role to play in challenging wrongs and that art served a political and very important social purpose. This is of course evident in all his works. Aramoana Landscape I (1980) is especially apt evidence of this, using the words of Cilla McQueen who in turn was using the incantatory, word repetition technique adopted by Hotere in his use of the poetry of Bill Manhire.
Round Midnight (2000), with a title derived from Miles Davis (Hotere’s favourite jazz musician), is filled with gesture and his eloquent, deft touch. It is a wonderful drawing featuring the Roman Cross and the Cross of Lorraine in the foreground, and gold ribbons which fly like streamers. Dawn / Water Poem – Bill Manhire (1975) is a striking, remarkably literal work as are the three linear, rhythmic nude drawings.
X P (undated) references a frequent pattern used in ecclesiastical design depicting the first two Greek letters for Christ. Emerging from the arched windows filled with darkness, Hotere is again using Te Kore (The Void), one of the three states of being in Māori spirituality where all things begin, emerge from, or recede towards. In Black Painting (Yellow, Red and Orange) (ca 1974) raised lines of colour sit in
front of a glossy black space where the viewer comes to see their very own presence in a void of indeterminate depth.
Black Window – Mungo at Aramoana (1982) is a vivid example of how Hotere built layers of meaning and a unique plurality into his imagery. In 1982 he visited Lake Mungo in south western New South Wales and the site of an ancient Aboriginal burial site. “The names and colours of the gold, red ochre and grey layers of sand formed on the lakeshore find their way into Hotere’s images: Mungo, Zanci, Gol Gol. So too do the grid-like drawings imitating the rectangular units in which archaeologists work and their location diagrams.”9
Mungo was also the nickname of a local Deborah Bay identity. Mungo Lewis lived in a 7.3 m x 3.7 m two-roomed cottage, built in the 1880s, perched on the edge of Aramoana Road. A family of 17 were raised there on a diet of fish and rabbits. Five other siblings did not survive and were interred in the sea wall. The youngest, Mungo, inherited the cottage in 1951 and lived there till his death in 2007, aged 83.10 At once an ancient burial site in NSW, Hotere links this to Aramoana, his older brother Jack (the circled dot) who died fighting with the Māori Battalion at the Sangro River, Italy, and to the Aramoana tidal flat and the threats posed to it by the smelter and its processes.
Accompanied by a select group of lithographs and drawings, Ralph Hotere Selected Works 1970 -2005 contains so many narratives and artistic achievements as to be impossible to quantify them all. It attests to “the nexus in Hotere’s work between the sensibility to the land, guardianship of it and modernist abstraction” while also demonstrating his career long concern with “identifying and challenging impediments to paradise”11 on earthly New Zealand.
- Stephen Higginson, 2024
9. Vincent O’Sullivan and Kriselle Baker, Ralph Hotere, Ron Sang Publications, 2008, p. 201.
10. Nigel Benson, “Cottage Restoration a Family Affair,” Otago Daily Times, 21 November 2013.
11. Gregory O’Brien, Hotere: Out the Black Window, Godwit / City Gallery Wellington, 1997, p. 95.
Triptych (2003)
Black Window - Mungo at Aramoana (1982)
Aramoana Landscape I (1980)
The Road to Arles from Avignon (1978)
Les Saintes Maries de la Mer (1986)
Dawn / Water Poem - Bill Manhire (1975)
Untitled (Reclining Woman in Blue Dress) (1970)
(1981)
Nudes, Port Chalmers (1972)
Window, Red Cross (ca 1995)
Fernando Pereira (2005)
Litho Drawing (1988)
CILLA McQUEEN, Ralph Hotere - Portrait at Careys Bay (1981)
Round Midnight (2000)
Winter Solstice (1988)
Anatomy of a Dance (1975)
Black Painting (Yellow, Red and Orange) (ca 1974)
The Black over the Gold (1992)
Black Window (1988)
The Road to Arles from Avignon (1978)
acrylic on unstretched canvas
frame: 1925 x 1375 x 35 mm
canvas: 1785 x 1240 mm
signed, dated, titled along bottom of canvas inscribed “Paterson”, “No. 5” verso bottom of canvas
Black Window, Red Cross
frame: 1110 x 995 x 45 mm
image: 905 x 900 mm
brolite lacquer, etched stainless steel, lead head nails on hardboard
Black Painting (Yellow, Red and Orange)
brolite lacquer on hardboard
frame: 1830 x 860 x 45 mm
Blue Triptych (2003)
spray paint, cast lead, corrugated steel
size on wall : 2550 x 2700 x 85 mm
panels: 2550 x 860 mm each
panels 1, 2 signed verso
panels numbered “1/3”, “2/3”, “3/3” verso
Courtesy of the Hotere Foundation Trust
Drawing for a Black Window (1981) mixed media on paper frame: 768 x 627 x 41 mm sheet: 510 x 390 mm
titled along top, signed, dated bottom left
Round Midnight (2000)
lithograph, drawing on paper
frame: 910 x 1065 x 40 mm
sheet: 565 x 765 mm
signed, dated bottom right; titled bottom left
Les Saintes Maries de la Mer (1986)
ink, acrylic, mixed media on paper frame: 1420 x 1105 x 35 mm
visible image: 1035 x 740 mm
titled upper left, signed, dated, inscribed “Port Chalmers” lower right
Fernando Pereira (2005)
enamel, blow torched, etched stainless steel in window frame
frame: 1245 x 1230 x 45 mm
signed, dated, inscribed “Careys Bay” bottom right
Courtesy of the Hotere Foundation Trust
The Black over the Gold (1992) acrylic, lacquer, gold leaf on glass in window frame frame: 805 x 707 x 52 mm signed, dated bottom left, titled in reverse script along bottom middle
Black Window - Mungo at Aramoana (1982)
acrylic on board
frame: 672 x 582 x 32 mm
panel: 380 x 300 mm
signed, dated, titled, inscribed “Black Window,” “Port Chalmers” bottom right
X P
gold leaf, enamel, glass in window frame frame: 900 x 1160 x 43 mm
Courtesy of the Hotere Foundation Trust
Winter Solstice (1988)
stained glass in wooden window frame frame: 1175 x 985 x 42 mm
signed, dated bottom left
Dawn / Water Poem - Bill Manhire (1975) oil on canvas
frame: 560 x 909 x 28 mm
stretcher: 510 x 855 mm
signed, dated, titled bottom right, signed, dated, titled verso
Litho Drawing (1988)
lithograph, metallic marker on paper
frame: 1072 x 837 x 20 mm
sheet: 753 x 530 mm
signed, dated lower right, titled lower centre
Black Window (1988)
lithograph on paper frame: 682 x 537 x 45 mm
sheet: 424 x 293 mm
signed, dated, titled, numbered “1/30” below printed image
Aramoana Landscape I (1980)
acrylic, ink, metallic paint on paper
frame: 950 x 730 x 45 mm
visible image: 765 x 560 mm
titled lower left, signed, dated, inscribed “Port Chalmers” bottom right
Two Nudes, Port Chalmers (1972) ink on paper
frame: 508 x 710 x 15 mm
mat window: 348 x 564 mm
signed, dated, inscribed “Port Chalmers” lower right
Anatomy of a Dance (1975)
ink, lithograph on paper
frame: 625 x 510 x 20 mm
mat window: 290 x 193 mm
signed, dated “8-75” lower right, titled lower right edge
Untitled (Reclining Woman in Blue Dress) (1970)
acrylic, ink on paper frame: 678 x 590 x 40 mm mat window: 385 x 320 mm signed, dated bottom right signed, dated, inscribed “Dunedin” on peice of backing board affixed verso
CILLA McQUEEN
Ralph Hotere - Portrait at Careys Bay (1981) pencil on paper frame: 332 x 331 x 28 mm sheet: 150 x 230 mm titled bottom left, signed, dated bottom right
ENQUIRIES
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