Summer Catalogue 2012 The Courtyard Gallery in association with:
pierre peeters gAllery 251 Parnell Road: Habitat Courtyard: Auckland: p.peeters@xtra.co.nz (09)3774832
Welcome to our Summer edition 2012 art catalogue
Our commitment is in providing you with the very best of what New Zealand art has to offer ranging from historical/traditional New Zealand masterpieces of the past to the Classic Moderns of our recent yesteryear into the Contemporary world of our countries finest examples Please enjoy this catalogue and for all enquiries ph (09)3774832 or contact us p.peeters@xtra.co.nz
Cover illustration: John Pule, Pia 1992
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Horatio Gordon Robley 1840-1930 Portrait of To Kuha Signed lower left G Robley Medium: Watercolour 200 x 150 mm oval Known for his detailed drawings of Maori heads showing the moko [tattoo] patterns. Arrived Auckland from Madrid on 4 January 1864 as ensign in 68th Durham Light Infantry. Was present at the battle of Gate Pa and made many sketches; painted war scenes, portraits of chiefs, and many detailed drawings of moko. Retired from the army 1887 and lived in London until his death. Many of his New Zealand drawings were made for English illustrated papers. He published Moko: or Maori Tattooing pub. 1896, Pounamu: Notes on New Zealand Greenstone pub. 1915. His drawings are reproduced in the 1922 edition of Maning’s Old New Zealand.
John Barr Clarke Hoyte 1835-1913 Bob’s Cove: Lake Whakitipu Signed Lower Left J C Hoyte Watercolour 390 x 640 mm John Barr Clarke Hoyte immigrated to New Zealand in 1860, settling in Auckland where he became Drawing Master at the Church of England Grammar School. Hoyte played a prominent role in the Auckland art scene and in 1870, co-founded the Auckland Society of Artists and sat on the Committee that planned the society’s first exhibition in 1871. In 1875, after a difference of opinion with other committee members, Hoyte handed in his resignation, and moved to Dunedin with his family. From 1876 he exhibited with the Otago Art Society showing views of the Southern lakes and mountains characterised by distinct intense blue hues. Influenced by the English tradition of topographic draftsmanship, Hoyte’s delicate watercolours won popular acclaim for their romantic and picturesque qualities. Providing valuable historical records of the New Zealand landscape, Hoyte’s work is represented in the public art collections of the Auckland Art Gallery, Aigantighe Art Gallery Timaru, Anderson Park Art Gallery, Auckland War Memorial Museum, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Rotorua Museum of Art and History, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Alexander Turnbull Library.
Laurence William Wison 1850-1912 Mount Burnet: Dusky Sound Signed and dated Lower left ‘ L W Wilson 1890’ Watercolour 190 x 310 mm
L.W. Wilson emigrated to Auckland in 1877 and then travelled extensively to settle in Dunedin in 1884. He painted in both oils and watercolours, became a painting companion of George O’Brien and a teacher. One of his pupils was the Dunedin artist Alfred O’Keefe. It was LW Wilson together with Grace Joel, Alfred O’Keefe, Jane Wimperis and Girolami Nerli who formed the Easel Club in 1895, a breakaway from the Dunedin Establishment, which offered a programme of special classes and the introduction of a professional lady model for life drawing. In 1904 LW Wilson left Dunedin for Melbourne where he spent 5 months on a commissioned painting of the city before he set out for England, eventually returning to New Zealand via India and Africa. He exhibited with the Canterbury Society of Arts in 1882 and the Otago Art Society between 1994 and 1904. His work was included in the NZ and South Seas Exhibition Dunedin 1889-90 and at the St Louis Exposition in 1904. LW Wilson is represented in the collections of all the major public galleries in New Zealand.
Henry William Kirkwood 1854-1925 Headwaters of the River Leith : Dunedin Initialled Lower Left HWK Oil on Board 280 x 440 mm
Born in Berwick-on-Tweed, Scotland in 1854 he was educated in Edinburgh. After completing his education he emigrated to New Zealand in 1879 at the age of 25. He appears to have initially moved from centre to centre working as an itinerant artist. From 1894 he taught at Nelson College until 1904. He spent the next twenty years painting full time again and exhibited regularly in all the main centres. During this period Kirkwood also completed several larger paintings done on commission for a number of wealthy patrons. Kirkwood’s paintings have always had great commercial appeal and highly collectable. The majority of his works are on a small scale and he also did a number of miniature landscapes, some on white glass. The few examples of his larger scale works that appear on the market show his ability to fill even a large canvas with incredible detail, particularly of the New Zealand bush. Kirkwood has had many imitators, even today, which reaffirms the great appeal of his style of painting.
Ernest William Christmas 1861-1918 Untitled Initialled and Dated Lower right EWC 1897 Oil on Board 240 x 370 mm
Ernest William Christmas was an Australian painter. He was born near Adelaide, South Australia in 1863 and studied art in Adelaide, Sydney and in London. He painted widely in England, exhibiting in the early years of the century at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts and in the provinces. He was elected to the British Royal British Academy in 1909. In 1910-11, he painted mountains and lakes in New Zealand, Argentina and Chile. He lived in San Francisco around 1900 and again around 1915. He was an avid traveller, but spent the last two years of his life in Hawaii, where he painted landscapes including dramatic volcano scenes. Ernest William Christmas died in Honolulu in 1918.
Nugent Welch 1881- 1970 Haze over the Moutere Signed lower left N Welch Watercolour 330 x 450 mm
Born in Akaroa, Banks Penisula, the son of artist Joseph Welch, Nugent Welch was a larger self taught painter.He became a professional artist in 1909, after leaving his job at the Wellington Harbour Board. The official war artist for the NZ Expeditionary force in WWI, he also became a well known plein air painter of Wellington landscapes, with particular attention to atmospheric weather affects. He was associated with James Nairn’s Silverstream Group. His work is represented in all the major public galleries in New Zealand as well as many private collections.
Nugent Welch 1881-1970 Untitled Initialled on verso NW 1931 Watercolour 220 x 285 mm
Nugent Welch 1881-1970 Untitled Initialled on verso NW 1933 Watercolour 220 x 285 mm
Nugent Welch 1881-1970 Untitled Initialled on verso NW 1935 Watercolour 220 x 285 mm
Nugent Welch 1881-1970 Untitled Initialled on verso NW 1931 Watercolour 220 x 285 mm
John Weeks 1888-1965 Patterned landscape Signed lower left John Weeks Oil on Board 380 x 480 mm
John Weeks was a key player in New Zealand history of art, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. Seen as a leading light with his modern direction in art, his influence was to have significant impact on the development of many New Zealand painters. Louise Henderson, Helen Brown and the Tole Brothers, were but a few who benefitted from his guidance. While many of his paintings, drawings and watercolours were destroyed in a disastrous fire in 1949 at Elam, this prolific artist produced such a large body of work that excellent examples of his approach, derived from Cubism, can still be found. His stature was such, that in 1958 he received an O.B.E for his services to art in New Zealand. Patterned Landscape, c.1950, is a classic example of Weeks’ insistence on “colour orchestration”, where colour harmonies are carefully applied throughout a composition. It also showcases his strong aptitude for design. An unruly New Zealand landscape therefore transforms into a vision of stylised repeating shapes containing predominately warm sienna, chocolate browns and grey blues and sea greens.
Charles Tole 1903-1988 Oil Tanks Signed and dated in the lower left hand corner Charles Tole 71-76 Oil on Board 470 x 610 mm
Charles Tole became a painter later in life, during his thirties. Initially guided by his elder brother, artist John Tole, he was to receive tutelage from John Weeks who he met in 1938. The Toles belonged to the Auckand Society of Arts and the Thornhill Group which included John Weeks, Louise Henderson, Alison Pickmere, Helen Brown and Wilfred Stanley Wallis. Re-working the Cubist teaching of Weeks, Tole reduced his forms to geometric essentials in what Avenal McKinnon describes as a “post Cubist vision�. His subjects - urban scenes: industrial buildings, boats and wharves, lent themselves well to a simplified, flattened style. Oil Tanks (1971-1976) is one of the finest examples of Charles Toles mature work, a painting that was resolved over a five year period. It is distinguished by its elegant partnership of warm and cool colours within a perfectly poised composition of geometric shapes and gently modulated volumes. A power-line simplified to a crucifix form lends a note of mystery and poetic depth. The visible pencil gridline reveals the considered and mathematical approach behind this beautifully realised vision of what would otherwise have been considered a scene distinctly un-picturesque.
Owen R Lee 1918-2003 Bernadette Sign lower right Owen R Lee Oil on Board 630 x 490 mm
Owen Lee was born in Christchurch in 1918, He attended the Canterbury University Christchurch School of Art from 1933-1939 studying under Cecil Kelly and Archibald Nicoll. Lee also studied in Brittany in 1955. His oeuvre covered a wide range of subjects including Still Life, Figure Studies, Landscapes and Marine scenes. Inspired by nature, he painted the Canterbury heartland and water scenes, capturing the atmospheric effects; one of his favourites painting locations was Lyttleton on Banks Peninsula. He also spent part of his life in the North Island, living nine years in Cambridge and 18 years in Auckland, where he was head of art at Takapuna Grammar School. From there he moved south joining the team at the Dunedin Art School until his resignation in 1980, when he took up full time painting. Owen Lee exhibited a number of times at the Paris Salon, an honour given to very few New Zealand artists. In 1962 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts London. Many successful exhibitions were held around New Zealand, particularly in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland over more than 60 years of painting. Owen Lee died in Christchurch in 2003 aged 84. His wife and life time companion, who was also an artist; Shirley Smeeton Lee, died only a few months later.
Joan Lindsay Seabirds at Sunset 1977 Signed and dated in lower right Joan Lindsay 77 Oil on Board 290 x 600 mm
Richard Killeen b 1946 Bang Bang Signed and dated lower right R Killeen 4/70 Oil on Hardboard 400 x 400 mm
1970 was a big year for Richard Killeen. It was a turning point in more ways than one. It was a few years since graduating from Elam Art School and certain ideas had started to take root. The early 1970s were also a time of dissent and questioning of social and political structures. Vietnam and its futility was made highly visible though the new medium of television. Killeen had his first solo show at Barry Lett Gallery in Auckland in the year Bang, Bang was painted. His famous ‘cut-outs’ of the late 70s, is foreshadowed in the jostling, interlocking relationships of Bang, Bang. He says of this formative time: While the cut-outs began in 1978, looking back now I can see I was working towards them in earlier work. ...The backgrounds in the paintings from 1969 started to come up and overlap with the figures. They started to become shapes which the figures interacted with. We can see in Bang, Bang, the early Killeen painterly exuberance of clashing shapes, words, the number 5, words, seemingly disparate objects in the form of pictograms and abstract areas of colour. While his future works tend towards the cryptic, here the boisterous, jostling forms actually take on related meanings in light of the politics of the period. Ultimately, the open association allowed by these interlocking/overlapping forms signals the random assemblage cut-outs to come.
Gordon Walters 1919-1995 Vertical Bars 1978 Signed and dated on verso Gordon Walters 78 Acrylic on Canvas 490 x 610 mm Gordon Walters was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1919. Walters trained at the Wellington Technical College in the 1930s. He travelled to Australia in 1946 and again in 1947, living in Sydney until 1949. Walters left for London and Europe in 1950 and returned to New Zealand in 1953. His career spanned six decades. In a time when landscape was the required subject in New Zealand he resolutely pursued geometric abstraction. His journey to Europe allowed him to study Mondrian and other European abstract painters at first hand. His lifelong response to Maori and Pacific indigenous art began in a time when most New Zealanders did not consider indigenous art to be “art” at all. His koru paintings, the motif of which is a geometric translation of the Maori koru, began in 1956 and lasted until his death in 1995. Walters painted ‘pure’ geometric abstractions throughout his life, endlessly paring down and refining his compositions. Their concerns include: transparency, the empty rectangle, and composition en abyme. In 1983, Auckland Art Gallery toured Gordon Walters, a retrospective exhibition of his work, and another survey Parallel Lines: Gordon Walters in Context in 1994 showed his wide ranging influence on contemporary New Zealand art.
Philip Clairmont (1949 - 1984) Helter Skelter, c.1972 - 1974 acrylic on two jute canvas sections and collage on board 2150mm x 950mm
Clairmont, arguably the most rock’n’roll, bohemian legends of New Zealand art, was, as Oliver Stead points out in Art of New Zealand Icons , “a superb draughtsman, “highly articulate”, and well-read. Clairmont, thanks to the instruction of European expressionist artist and teacher Rudi Gopas, was well educated in the works of the Masters. The famous chair paintings of van Gogh and Gauguin, along with the powerful, painterly works of Francis Bacon, was part of that art historical grounding. Stead notes, “Clairmont’s grungy chairs and couches convincingly take on the masters at their own game.” The chair, the fireplace, the light bulb, the couch and the sink, are the domestic motifs that Clairmont used as vehicles for emotion during the psychedelic 70s. His hallucinogenic-drug fuelled expressionism – of distorted forms and heightened colour, function, the artist said, as an extended “self-portrait”. His use of unstretched canvas and found collage fragments, suitably anti-bourgeois in effect, nods to the influence of his former tutor Gopas. Helter Skelter, also the name of a famous Beatles song, signals his working environment; the artist cocooned with the surround sound of the psychedelic of the time. Helter Skelter is a powerful, mesmerising and pulsating work; a majestic example of Clairmont at his rock and roll best.
John Pule b 1962 Pia 1992 Oil on Canvas 210 x 171 cm
John Puhiatau Pule, born in Liku, Niue in 1962, Pule is a Niuean artist, novelist and poet. He has lived in Auckland, New Zealand since the age of 3. The Queensland Art Gallery describes him as “one of the Pacific’s most significant artists”. Of his literary career, Pule explained: “I just wanted to write about growing up in New Zealand, and about being the youngest of 17 kids and about migration—but I wasn’t sure how to organize ideas, so I just started writing.” He also describes his writing as a means of “decolonizing his mind”. His work expresses his experience as a Niuean in New Zealand: “My heart and my thoughts were always on Niue. But here I was living in Aotearoa on someone else’s land. Writing helped change me, painting helped change me. I went back to Niue as often as I could, and I’d weed and clear the graves for my family and friends’ families. It’s a way of saying I’m back. [...] We go back home [to Niue] with our Nikes and our jeans and we think we know things. But the local people just think we’re stupid. They know where all the trees are and the pathways and where the mythologies and the stories live.” Pule’s first novel, The Shark that Ate the Sun (Ko E Mago Ne Kai E La), was published in 1992. Burn My Head in Heaven (Tugi e ulu haaku he langi) followed in 2000, and Restless people (Tagata kapakiloi) in 2004. His published poetry includes Sonnets to Van Gogh and Providence (1982), Flowers after the Sun (1984) and Bond of Time (1985).[2] In 2000 Pule was the University of Auckland Literary Fellow and in 2002 took up a distinguished visiting writer’s residency in the department of English at the University of Hawaii. In 2005 he was awarded an art residency at Roemerapotheke, Basel, Switzerland and in 2004 he was honoured with the prestigious Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation of New Zealand. Pule’s artwork includes painting, drawing, printmaking, film-making and performance. The topics of his work include Niuean cosmology and Christianity, as well as perspectives on migration and colonialism. His work comprises both painting on canvas and bark cloth painting, a traditional Polynesian artform. He was a guest professor of creative writing at the University of Hawai‘i in the spring of 2002. In 2005, he co-wrote Hiapo: Past and present in Niuean barkcloth, a study of a traditional Niuean artform, with Australian writer and anthropologist Nicholas Thomas. Since 1991 John Pule has exhibited extensively throughout New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the USA, the Pacific and Asia. From 1996 to present he has held solo exhibitions in New Zealand, and in Melbourne Australia at the Karen Woodbury Gallery. In 2005 he exhibited at the Galerie Romerapotheke in Zurich.
Bill Culbert Red,Yellow Blue Found plastic bottles and Flororescent tube 290 x 610 x 80 mm
Bill Culbert was born in Port Chalmers, Otago and grew up in Wellington. After graduating from Canterbury School of Art in 1957 he received a scholarship at the Royal College of Art in London. Culbert has worked in a range of media: sculpture, installation and photography. He is particularly known for his sculptural explorations around concepts of light, a subject which has occupied him since the 1960s. He employs materials such as light bulbs, lamp shades, fluorescent tubes and plastic bottles, wine glasses and suitcases. The strength of Culbert’s sculptural installations are in part due to their seeming simplicity and in many cases, gentle humour. A senior artist who is highly esteemed, he has had over 100 solo exhibitions in New Zealand, England, Europe, the USA and Australia since 1960, and has been invited to represent New Zealand at the 55th Venice Biennale. Culbert is the subject of a recent publication by Ian Wedde, Making Light Work, 2009. His Red, Yellow, Blue light installation which features in Wedde’s book (p.150, pl. 55), was exhibited at the pivotal exhibition Toi Toi Toi: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel in 1999 and later that year at Auckland Art Gallery. Red, Yellow, Blue, a dynamic assemblage of three glowing primary colours, comprises of two motor oil bottles which bracket a Sunlight liquid bottle. The latter is a familiar house-hold name to New Zealanders. Primary colours in the form of commercial plastic vessels feature frequently throughout Culbert’s oeuvre. In 2010, Te Papa, The Museum of New Zealand, acquired the assemblage Handy Andy, also a tripartite format lit by fluorescent tube. It is the smaller scaled works, Wedde notes, “...that have been popular with collectors… because they adapt to domestic circumstances; and...because of their charm, wit and visual appeal.” This is certainly appropriate of Red, Yellow, Blue. EXHIBITED: TOI TOI TOI: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, Museum Fridericianum Kassel, 23 January - 5 April 1999. Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tāmaki, 21 May - 8 August 1999. Sue Crockford Gallery, c.1995. ILLUSTRATED: Catalogue published for the exhibition TOI TOI TOI: Three Generations of Artists from New Zealand, Museum Fridericianum Kassel, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tāmaki, 1999. cat. no. 97, p 103. Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, Ian Wedde, Auckland University Press, 2009, p. 150 (pl. 55, Bottle Combinations 82 - 07).
Pricelist
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Horatio Gordon Robley J.C Hoyte L.W. Wilson Nugent Welch Nugent Welch Nugent Welch Nugent Welch Nugent Welch Henry William Kirkwood Ernest William Christmas John Weeks Charles Tole Owen R Lee Richard Killeen Gordon Walters Philip Clairmont John Pule Bill Culbert
Portrait of To Kuha Bob’s Cove, Lake Wakatipu Mt Burnett, Dusky Sound... Haze over the Moutere Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Headwaters of the River Leith : Dunedin Untitled Patterned Landscape Oil Tanks Bernadette Bang, Bang Vertical Bars 1978 Helter Skelter Pia Red, Yellow, Blue
The Courtyard Gallery in association with:
pierre peeters gAllery 251 Parnell Road: Habitat Courtyard: Auckland: p.peeters@xtra.co.nz (09)3774832
POA POA $1,750 $1,650 $1,250 $1,250 $1,250 $1,250 $1,750 $1,850 POA POA $2,850 $12,500 POA POA $45,000 $16,500