Important Paintings & Contemporary Art

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A RT AT W E B B’ S Charles Ninow cninow@webbs.co.nz +64 29 770 4767 Simon Bowerbank sbowerbank@webbs.co.nz +64 21 045 1464 Ben Ashley bashley@webbs.co.nz +64 21 113 8881 Gillie Deans gdeans@webbs.co.nz +64 27 22 69 785 Hannah Daly artteam@webbs.co.nz +64 9 524 6804 Aleksandra Petrovic apetrovic@webbs.co.nz +64 9 524 6804 Antonia Milsom amilsom@webbs.co.nz +64 9 524 6804 Subscription Enquiries frontofhouse@webbs.co.nz Advertising Enquiries marketing@webbs.co.nz 23-25 Falcon Street Parnell, Auckland 1052 PO Box 99251, Newmarket Auckland 1149, New Zealand +64 9 524 6804 www.webbs.co.nz

Catalogue printed by McCollams www.mccollams.co.nz Catalogue printed on Orbit Satin. Orbit is a range of ultra premium triple coated papers designed with an exceptionally smooth surface resulting in bright ultra sharp imagery and feels beautiful. Orbit Satin is an FSC Certified stock.

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FREE ENTRY

INTRODUCTION 7.

VIEWING TIMES 9.

INTERVIEW WITH GRAHAME SYDNEY 10.

INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW MCLEOD 14.

CATALOGUE 22.

WEBB’S DEPARTMENTS 86.

CONDITIONS OF SALE FOR BUYERS 110.

INDEX 111.

INTRODUCTION In the 1950s, as young Peter Webb swept the floors and cleaned the bathrooms of the Auckland Art Gallery, the seeds of Webb’s Auction House were sown. It was in these formative years that Peter developed a relationship with exhibitions officer Colin McCahon, to whom he attributes the initial stages of his art education.

Peter would later move on from the Auckland Art Gallery to open Auckland’s first dealer gallery at Argus House on High Street. At night, he worked as a proofreader from 7pm until midnight to support the gallery. During the day, he attempted to sell paintings by artists such as Colin McCahon, Rita Angus, Milan Mrkusich and Toss Woolaston—with mix of budding salesmanship and a little luck. Unfortunately, this lasted just a year before Peter closed the Argus gallery to seek alternative employment.

Unperturbed, Peter quickly found a position as a trainee auctioneer at George Walkers, which was, at the time, the leading auction house in the country. After a period of trying to convince his manager to host art sales, Peter eventually left to start Cordy’s, his own specialist art auction house, named after the middle name of Hamish Keith, his business partner. Eight years later, Peter returned to the Auckland Art Gallery as an exhibitions officer to instigate a schedule of highly successful international exhibitions before moving on again to run Barrington Gallery on Customs Street. Finally, Peter branched out and opened his own gallery on Lorne Street, the name of the new venture: Peter Webb Galleries.

Thirty-nine years later, the business that Peter Webb pioneered in 1976 is evolving once more. At the beginning of this year, Webb’s moved from its previous Manukau Road location to a newly renovated building on Falcon Street in Parnell. This April sale of Important Paintings & Contemporary Art marks the first page of this new chapter in Webb’s long history. Many changes have taken place over the past few months, but our future plans are strictly guided by the goals and aspirations upon which Webb’s was founded in 1976: specialisation in the placement of exemplary New Zealand cultural assets and the cultivation of a strong secondary market for art in New Zealand.

Our ambitious future starts with this first 2015 sale—a carefully selected overview of some of the best works of art currently available to the secondary market. We invite you to view these works at our new Parnell premises, and, as always, we encourage you to contact our team of Fine Art Specialists if you need any art-related help or advice.

CONSIGN NOW AUCTION 11 JUNE 2015 ENTRIES CLOSE 12 MAY 2015

Yvonne Todd, January Estimate $10,000 - $15,000

VIEWING TIMES Viewing Wednesday 1 April

9am – 5:30pm

Thursday 2 April

9am – 5:30pm

Friday 3 April

By appointment

Saturday 4 April

11am – 4pm

Sunday 5 April

By appointment

Monday 6 April

11am – 4pm

Tuesday 7 April

9am – 5:30pm

Wednesday 8 April

9am – 5:30pm

Thursday 9 April

9am – 12:00pm

Auction Thursday 9 April

6:30pm

Buyer’s Premium A buyer's premium of 17.5% will be charged on all items in this sale.

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

IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART

A FEW WORDS WITH

GRAHAME SYDNEY

by Graham Beattie

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WEBB’S

Grahame Sydney. Photograph by Don Fuchs.

GRAHAM BEATTIE: Your paintings are all known for depicting Otago in one way or another. You obviously have had a lifelong love affair with the province.

GRAHAME SYDNEY: It all started with holidays in Arrowtown with families from our home neighbourhood when I was about 10 years old. The Sydneys had a family crib—“bach” to you northerners— at Karitane, up the coast from Dunedin which was a constant in my life, with boating, seaside fishing from the rocks, the inescapable smell of the ocean, and adventures any kid would cherish but always seemingly under a cloud of grey drizzle or chilly coastal winds. The neighbours returned from their Central holidays so tanned and sun-basted it was as if they’d been to another world, and indeed, it felt like a separate country to me once I began going there myself. I did fall in love with it, totally. It felt hot, dazzlingly sunlit, dry, calm, and silent. It had a marvellously romantic gold history which didn’t feel so far away from us—we panned for gold almost every day up the Arrow River—and all of this beneath a sky which, in memory at least, was always blue and cloudless. This was in the late 1950s,

early 1960s, when Arrowtown was small and unwanted and long before the rampant commercial expansion of Queenstown.

The landscape was natural then. Irrigation and chemical fertilisers hadn’t turned the golden grass into a lurid green, the seasons were wonderfully contrasting, and the rivers mostly unaffected by “progress.” Dad bought a large section on the then-outskirts of Arrowtown in 1960 when I was 12 years old, and from then on, we drove through the wide, empty interior every chance we got, headed for the crib. Mum was a homemaking mother, totally devoted to family needs, and I was a very happy beneficiary of that good fortune. It is a different world—or was then. I loved it and still do.

BEATTIE: You are, of course, famous for your landscapes of Central Otago, which encompass oils, watercolours, egg tempera, lithographs, etchings and now photography. Can you say something about the difference in painting and photography when it comes to capturing landscape?

SYDNEY: I’ve been a professional painter for nearly forty years now, and I hope to die a painter. But the essence of that painter’s life is how I feel about a

place and how I see it and how I can turn those emotions and observations into a more permanent, recognisable form.

There are other media for that purpose now, like photography and film, not just paint and pencil, so I’m enjoying a wider range of opportunities to put out there the things I love, care about, am fascinated by, can’t forget, etc.—those things which fuel my art, I guess you could say.

Painting, for me, has always been a slow process of building, constructing an image, deliberately and thoughtfully taking from nature those elements I want to use, leaving others out, re-composing, re-ordering, using only what I think the painting needs to be effective. It’s a continual process of refining, shifting about, eliminating, changing—trying to intensify within the world of the frame, trying to get to some sort of essence. It all represents departures from truth, lurches away from the reality of what might have triggered the idea in the first place. The “realism” of my paintings is utterly misleading and always has been.

You live with the label, but it’s wrong.

Photography, on the other hand, does a different job for me: It’s about the decisive CATALOGUE 509

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IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART

PAINTING, FOR ME, HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SLOW PROCESS OF BUILDING, CONSTRUCTING AN IMAGE, DELIBERATELY AND THOUGHTFULLY TAKING FROM NATURE THOSE ELEMENTS I WANT TO USE, LEAVING OTHERS OUT, RE-COMPOSING, RE-ORDERING, USING ONLY WHAT I THINK THE PAINTING NEEDS TO BE EFFECTIVE.

moment, about the instinct at work in the split second, about framing, composing on the spot—speed, confidence, knowing … and about the truth. Photographs are the far greater reality for me—the real evidence of being there at that particular moment.

Still noticing, knowing, observing, doing all the things I do as a studio painter, but instantly. I dislike the Photoshop interventions and alterations; that’s for others, not me. I don’t need to play with my photographic images because I have painting if I want to play those games.

Photoshop allows photographers to pretend they’re painters and to do all the things I do as a painter. But I like my photographs to stand as testament to that magic moment, that instant.

BEATTIE: I guess being an artist you can really live anywhere. What was it that took you to live in the isolated Cambrian

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Valley, surely one of the coldest occupied places in New Zealand? How much adjustment did it take after city living?

SYDNEY: It was a dream of mine to build a place of my own and work with an architect mate on the project. (Had I had my wish, I’d have been an architect, and my family tree is laden with builders.) But, when it was all done and I came to actually shift here permanently, I was scared, lonely and certain I’d made a colossal blunder.

It took weeks, months probably, for me to start feeling comfortable and in any way “at home.” But it did happen, and now I don’t want to be anywhere else.

I came to the Cambrian Valley first in the early 1990s, though I had visited St Bathans and the Vulcan Hotel on occasion much earlier. A local farmer phoned me sometime in the early 1990s to ask if I’d

help him and his group design a triathlon course for St Bathans (I was reasonably well known then as a multi-sporter), so I came through from Dunedin to help them and thought it a pretty attractive, rather secret, little corner of Central Otago. The family came for a couple of holidays after that. We bought a mudbrick cottage in the Ida Valley, and I eventually purchased a block of land in Cambrian Valley from that same farmer looking across the valley towards Mount St Bathans and the Hawkdun Range, which I’d always found immensely appealing.

The farmer in question was Donald Harley, whose portrait is in the book—very tragically being claimed by motor neurone disease.

BEATTIE: Up until the mid-70s, you were a teacher during the week and an artist on the weekends. How did you make the change to become a full-time artist?

SYDNEY: I taught secondary school English and geography in 1971–72 in Cromwell. All through teaching and before that at university, I’d painted constantly in my bedroom at home, holding onto a futile dream that one day I might be a full-time painter. The only successful full-time painters at the time (mid-1960s) were mountain–and–lakes painters, like Douglas Badcock or Aston Greathead or Peter McIntyre. It was the Kelliher Art Prize era, when the big names of our

WEBB’S

art world now were almost all part-time painters. There was no real career path for artists if you didn’t want to paint for tourists and few “dealers.” There were art societies for all the amateurs like me, art shops—framers with imported prints on the walls—and even the public galleries were still collecting English, Australian or works from cultures other than our own.

PETER WEBB KICK-STARTED MY CAREER, WITH BOTH GENEROSITY AND PURE PROFESSIONALISM. I AM GRATEFUL TO HIM TO THIS DAY. It all began to change in the late 1960s, with the first comprehensive art books on NZ art, a couple of major touring shows of our own workers. I remember a show with McCahon, Rita Angus, Mike Smither, Hotere, Bill Sutton, etc. coming to the Otago Museum foyer while I was at university. The first of the dealers were beginning to emerge about that time, too. Dawson’s downstairs gallery in Dunedin, run by Maureen Hitchings was the exciting one locally.

The other significant event for me at that stage was the establishment of the Frances Hodgkins fellowship at Otago University, which brought onto the campus my first real artists from beyond the art society world: Tanya Ashken, Derek Ball, Ralph Hotere, Michael Smither. I was very generously helped by these people—Derek, Ralph and Mike in particular—and it gradually dawned on me that a full-time career might be possible after all, especially if I went to England to prove myself.

So, at the end of 1972 and teaching, I went off to London, to be an artist and never return … . Eighteen months later, having scarcely lifted a pencil in anger, deeply gloomy, homesick and miserable—a thorough failure—I was enticed back home by my parents to give this damned painting a good crack and either succeed or fail once and for all. I returned to my bedroom studio.

We decided that I would work Dad’s hours and that, if all went well, I might manage to get a show in Auckland after a few years of working up the country—a Dunedin show first, then maybe one in Christchurch, then possibly Wellington.

I was working on a still-life exercise, trying to remember how to paint.

When that stranger left a couple of hours later, he had purchased the unfinished painting and promised to purchase everything I completed from that day on.

What’s more, he would save them for a one-man show at his Auckland Gallery when enough had been assembled. He did both of these things—bought everything I finished, without direction or interference, and showed them all together at the Lee Cramp Gallery in Auckland in March 1975. The show sold out on the first night, made the front page of the NZ Herald.

That man was Peter Webb. It was pure luck. Had I stayed one more month in London, I would have missed him!

Peter kick-started my career, with both generosity and pure professionalism.

I am grateful to him to this day.

Originally published in November 2011 in Beattie’s Book Blog: http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.co.nz

Almost immediately, my luck changed completely. Ten days after arriving home, met at the Lyttelton ferry by my father, I was working upstairs on my first proper painting since leaving NZ, when a stranger came to the front door, and Mum showed him upstairs to where

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AN INTERVIEW WITH

ANDREW MCLEOD

by Megan Dunn

Andrew McLeod’s studio. Photograph by Megan Dunn.

IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART

Andrew McLeod’s studio. Photograph by Megan Dunn.

Andrew McLeod lives in a Mount Eden flat with his partner, the painter Liz Maw. Their studio is cluttered with art and objects, books, paintbrushes, unusual talismans. During my visit I notice a postcard of Michael Illingworth’s creepy As Adam and Eve (1965), tucked behind a light switch. McLeod is not an artist known for holding back: his paintings and digital collages, like his studio and his flat, are packed full of stuff. Art historical references float in suspended animation.

McLeod’s work is baroque, occasionally grotesque. We tend to expect eccentricity from artists, and McLeod delivers in spades. He plays in a band called Evil Ocean (a pun on the word ‘evolution’) and has produced his own wayward textile designs for fashion designer Jimmy D. McLeod moves freely between representation and abstraction; he’s not an artist who can be cleanly categorised.

He produces artist’s books also densely packed with images and texts. McLeod’s art embodies the abyss, offering glimpses into the infinite index of the world. He’s an artist enthralled by, but not obviously reverential to, the classical masters. With McLeod you can guarantee what comes out of the canon will be a blast, and the results won’t be tidy.

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WEBB’S

MEGAN: When you appropriate images, do you think about the history of the artworks you choose or does your selection evolve more organically?

ANDREW: I am a very visual type of artist. One of my strengths is constant research in visual culture, design, fashion, and the way everything fits in historically: the influences, not necessarily the art historical story, but the – MEGAN: The look, the aesthetic?

Andrew: There’s what artists say and there’s what they do with their work.

I am more focused on what everyone was doing with their work. Just think of what artists have said about their work throughout history. It’s usually very specific to the time, a spin – which is understandable – for their market or audience. Art manifestos are often quite hilarious. … My latest book is a monograph and it includes [John] Ruskin and George Orwell and stuff from Egyptology and Project Gutenberg. It’s meant to be helpful if you really want to read something.

MEGAN: Helpful for people looking at your work?

ANDREW: Yeah, when you have any text in an art book, the text is helpful to understand the artist’s world or to provide an introduction.

It’s harder for me because people don’t necessarily write about my type of work.

I’m essentially a painter. The curator won’t want me saying this, but this show is painting for people who don’t like painting. I am essentially a painter in the way I compose and think.

MEGAN: Your website is described as an index and I think that’s deeply apt; already our conversation is quite sprawling, and your work is quite sprawling, in a good way; you’re always cataloguing and indexing visually.

ANDREW: Yes visually, that’s the keyword; it’s image driven. How do I get across the idea that I’m a visual artist?

In contemporary art there sometimes seems to be confusion as to whether the artist is being very visual or not. That’s understandable. People don’t always know how to respond to art, they don’t know if they have to read the text or not.

MEGAN: You mean, the audience doesn’t know if an art work can be understood by just looking at it any more: they wonder if they need to read the wall text or something else to decode the piece?

ANDREW: That’s normal in contemporary art: most viewers who aren’t artists are insecure about knowing how to interpret work.

MEGAN: Let’s track back a bit. When you and I were at Elam together, a tutor in first year told me, ‘Less is more’, and I feel like that message didn’t get to you – or if it did, it fell on deaf ears.

ANDREW: Absolutely. I never listened to anything anyone ever said, definitely not about painting or visual stuff. At the time I did the contemporary art papers and read the books about conceptual art, as you do. So I do know something about it; but actually that ‘less is more’ phrase often applies now to modernist design, and to minimalism and abstraction.

MEGAN: The ideology behind that statement has its place in history.

ANDREW: Yes and sometimes the ideology has nothing to do with the actual work – which goes back to what I said before about the way you can look at and be into art for what the artist said, and that’s all good; but if you’re into it for what the artist or designer did you might get a completely different story.

MEGAN: I remember visiting your studio and Brendon Wilkinson’s, which was near yours at Elam. Both of you were undeniably productive. ‘Precocious’ is a word that comes to mind; even now when I think about your practice the word ‘inexhaustible’ still applies. I like the way you work boldly in abstraction, but I think your heart is more in representation.

ANDREW: What’s the difference?

The difference is just in traditions.

Kazimir Malevich is part of the tradition of abstraction. I know that tradition deeply because I was taught it at high school. When you took art as a subject you got taught a certain theme. The New Zealand Western education system introduced me to art, it definitely wasn’t something I had to find by myself.

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IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART

MEGAN: Not many artists will move freely between abstraction and representational work and not many will show both simultaneously. I do think you’re an artist who’s interested in genre. You will put a small abstraction with a baroque frame around it in an exhibition with figurative paintings; you are quite happy to genre bend.

ANDREW: Yes, but that’s the thing: early Malevichs did have those frames. Abstract artists used frames, oil paint and easels.

MEGAN: In one of your earlier interviews you said making good culture is hard. I noticed that you used the word ‘culture’; you could have used ‘art’, you could have used ‘paintings’.

ANDREW: If you want to make good work you have to try everything you can to make it good, right? It’s not easy and sometimes your work ends up being completely out of fashion, but that’s the best work you could do at the time. Do you know what I mean?

MEGAN: Fashion comes and goes; any artists that go for any length of time will have to work through fashion.

ANDREW: I see young artists coming through and I think, ‘They know nothing.’

But it’s a giant deal for the audience and there’s a truth to that newness as well.

It’s the good side of not respecting your elders – and why should you respect your elders unless they have done something amazing that you think is great?

MEGAN: But you respect a lot of the artists whose work you incorporate into your own practice?

ANDREW: Yeah, they are good people, the awesome ones.

That’s what it’s all about.

MEGAN: How many hours a day do you paint?

ANDREW: I don’t know. I paint every day unless I am doing a digital print. I have a studio right here in the bedroom with little paints and stuff; I watch movies and paint; sometimes I do digital stuff, so most of the prints will be done watching movies.

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MEGAN: Are you interested in science?

ANDREW: Yeah, totally. I mostly read science. From what I’ve read there is a lot of interesting stuff on cognitive dissonance, and on the functional MRI scanner.

Stuff that happens to stroke victims …

When you make work, you are making work for human beings, which are a kind of conglomeration: layer upon layer of the previous species that we were, like the reptile brain is still in there and turned on. You have two visual systems: the original reptile visual system and the later evolved mammal visual system.

MEGAN: I love your poster including the John Martin watercolour, The country of the iguanodon. It reminded me of J G Ballard’s novel The Drowned World, which is set in the future when the earth is overheating and swamps and alligators and iguanas are spreading throughout cities.

The characters in the book experience a psychological meltdown to a reptile state: the novel ends on the image of a man staring at a sunset in this primordial world.

ANDREW: I’m interested in the way narrative works in paintings and posters; obviously it’s not linear. One thing does not happen after another. The narrative in a painting is created from compositional stuff and paintwork … I’m interested in the way people see work in art galleries, whether it’s at a dealer gallery or Te Papa. The interesting thing is the interaction between the two worlds. The misunderstandings are fascinating. I’m not the same as a curator or collector. When I answer a question that I haven’t thought about before, the interviewer won’t always understand and I have to think about it again.

MEGAN: This seems like a good place to finish the interview – or is the interview finished? I don’t know. We’ll leave it open-ended.

ANDREW: Yeah, I’m not dead yet.

Originally published in March 2013 in Off the Wall, Te Papa’s quarterly online art magazine: arts.tepapa.govt.nz/off-the-wall

WEBB’S

Andrew McLeod painting in studio. Photograph by Kevin Lauv.

Andrew McLeod’s studio. Photograph by Megan Dunn.

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CONSIGN NOW IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART AUGUST 2015 Entries are now invited for the second sale of Important Paintings & Contemporary Art for 2015. Including both exceptional New Zealand modernist paintings and major works by New Zealand’s pre-eminent contemporary artists, our August auction promises to be a highlight of the year. Feel free to contact our team of specialists for a no-obligation appraisal.

Charles Ninow cninow@webbs.co.nz +64 9 524 6804 +64 29 770 4767

Simon Bowerbank sbowerbank@webbs.co.nz +64 9 524 6804 +64 210 451 464

THURSDAY 9 APRIL 2014, 6.30PM

IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART

VIEWING FROM Wednesday 1 April

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1 Gordon Walters

2 Shane Cotton

Untitled

Red Chasing Blue

oil on canvas signed Gordon Walters and dated 1987 in brushpoint verso 450mm x 350mm

oil on canvas signed S Cotton, dated 2007 and inscribed Red Chasing Blue in brushpoint lower right 840mm x 1150mm

ESTIMATE $30,000 - $40,000

ESTIMATE $35,000 - $45,000

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3w Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup (Onion) silkscreen print, artist’s proof signed Andy Warhol in ink verso 895mm x 585mm PROVENANCE Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity, signed by Erika Meyerovich, dated June 22nd, 1989 ESTIMATE $20,000 - $30,000 26

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4w Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup (Vegetable) silkscreen print, artist’s proof signed Andy Warhol in ink verso 895mm x 585mm PROVENANCE Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity, signed by Erika Meyerovich, dated June 22nd, 1989 ESTIMATE $20,000 - $30,000 CATALOGUE 509

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5 John Pule Niniko Nui acrylic on canvas signed John Puhiatau Pule and dated 2004 in brushpoint lower edge; inscribed Niniko Nui in ink verso 2000mm x 2000mm ESTIMATE $35,000 - $55,000 28

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6 Philip Clairmont Interior with Candle oil, acrylic and ink on card 880mm x 630mm PROVENANCE Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity, written by Viki Clairmont.

ESTIMATE $25,000 - $35,000 CATALOGUE 509

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Tree Time is a construction comprised of both fantasy and reality, a fictional childhood retroactively pieced together with the kind of purposeful play that is practiced in childhood and, more often than not, lost in adulthood.

Inherently resistant to easy analysis, Andrew McLeod’s paintings and digital collages are assembled from a virtually infinite supply of seemingly random images.

McLeod soaks up indiscriminate combinations of disparate imagery like a sponge, and paints the resulting mixtures onto canvas. In recent years, these painted collages have been comprised of dizzying arrays of art historical references, but the paintings from the early period of McLeod’s career—to which this painting belongs—are more concerned with childhood. Rendered using the type of vibrant primary colours often found on children’s toys, these early paintings combine surreal assortments of bizarre imagery and characters: animated teddy bears, giant insects, miniature people and colourful renditions of terraced houses floating in a vacuum.

A regularly reoccurring motif found in McLeod’s early compositions is that of the treehouse, a quintessential symbol of childhood, which comes to the fore in Tree Time.

Often constructed by children themselves, treehouses can be a child’s first experience of a home away from home. Treehouses are transitional living spaces situated between the real world and a child’s fantasy world that represents the formative years in which a child develops his or her own

identity and freedom. Across two panels, Tree Time presents the canopy of a giant rhododendron tree inhabited by two aquamarine woodbox treehouses. On the right panel, a dark-haired boy, perhaps a young Andrew McLeod, sneakily busies himself in his treehouse scrawling on a yellow canvas.

On the left, a blonde girl, similar in appearance to McLeod’s partner, artist Liz Maw (who regularly depicts McLeod in her own paintings), cleans paintbrushes in her own treehouse next to a freshly painted blue trapezoid.

The canopy surrounding the two makeshift spaces is a dense hub of activity. Above the boy, a furry teddy bear carpenter is modifying the tree with a handsaw. A giant bumblebee sits in a rope beehive above the girl. A mop and cricket bat float past all of it, as if not affected by gravity. In the top left corner of the painting, a camouflaged snake approaches the bear, and various birds perch in the two treehouses. A radio balances precariously on the edge of a branch.

Tree Time is a construction comprised of both fantasy and reality, a fictional childhood retroactively pieced together with the kind of purposeful play that is practiced in childhood and, more often than not, lost in adulthood.

SIMON BOWERBANK

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7 Andrew McLeod Tree Time oil on canvas signed Andrew McLeod and dated 2005 in brushpoint lower right 1700mm x 2500mm ILLUSTRATED McLeod, Andrew, Monograph1, Andrew McLeod, Auckland, 2012, p.61.

REFERENCE The work is illustrated in the artist made booklet Shhhhh Shhhhh Shhhhh Shhhhh Shangri-la edition 14/300.

ESTIMATE $35,000 - $45,000 CATALOGUE 509

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8 Peter Robinson Boy Am I Scared Eh! oil stick and acrylic on paper 935mm x 670mm signed Peter Robinson and dated ‘97 in graphite lower right ESTIMATE $35,000 - $45,000

In the last decade, Peter Robinson’s largescale, fabricated installations have established him as one of New Zealand’s most senior practitioners. It was these later works, which reference geomorphic mass and molecular structure, with which he represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and then won the Walters Prize in 2008. However, it is his early works from the 1990s that hold the most profound level of cultural significance. The works from this period generally engaged with popular ideological positions—the type of vitriol that might emerge from a particularly heated debate on ‘talkback’ radio–and continue to hold currency because of their ability to mirror contemporary political debate. Recently, a work from this period, featuring a prominent left-facing swastika, was given new significance when it was exhibited at Germany’s Frankfurter Kunstverein in a Creative New Zealand-funded survey of contemporary New Zealand art. The exhibition, entitled Contact, opened more than a decade after the work was originally made.

Boy Am I Scared Eh! takes its choice of phrase from McCahon’s iconic painting of 1976 entitled Scared which featured the words Am I Scared Boy (Eh) inscribed across a dark, bleak field of sky. McCahon’s adoption of urban Māori vernacular, accented with the phrase ‘eh’, was intended to draw attention to a generation’s dislocation from its own cultural heritage and Robinson’s adoption of and amendments to the phrase endow McCahon’s words with a somewhat prophetic quality. Robinson’s claim to a mixed European and Māori ancestry obviously lends him the authority to engage with the politics of the tangata whenua’s treatment under the governance of the Treaty of Waitangi; however, with a stated 3.125% Māori ethnicity, Robinson’s claim is intended to be perceived as somewhat tenuous. Rather than subscribe to a position that is simply concerned with the rights of an indigenous people, Boy Am I Scared Eh! seeks to address the potentially segregational nature of biculturalism.

CHARLES NINOW

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9 Gordon Walters Study for Tamaki No. 2 gouache on paper signed Gordon Walters, dated 83 and inscribed Study for Tamaki No. 2 in graphite lower edge 325mm x 226mm NOTE This work is the original study for the well recognised screenprint Tamaki, published

by Gordon Walters in 1983.

ESTIMATE $50,000 - $60,000 34

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With a composition that deviates from the uninterrupted bands of horizontal colour that characterised Walters’ initial ‘koru’ studies, Study Tamaki No 2 aimed to explore the symbolic potential of the koru form in even greater depth than the artist had accomplished before.

Gordon Walters’ iconic koru-derived imagery was predated by collages and paintings that utilised visual forms appropriated not only from various indigenous Pacific cultures, but also from the cultural production of marginalised ‘modern-day’ communities to which he’d had exposure.

While the artist’s early studies (made during the 1950s) based on traditional Marquesan and parietal Maori art are perhaps his best known, Walters’ most fascinating works from this period are those that feature compositions based on the drawings of Rolph Hattaway1—a patient from a psychiatric hospital where the artist once worked. These paintings, which were assembled from both right-angled and irregularly curved fields of colour, sought to explore the semiotic potential of concrete imagery that was considered devoid of meaning. Walters’ studies from the earlier part of the 1950s firmly established his artistic project as a process of liberating motifs that were previously regarded as primitive.

Produced in 1983, Study for Tamaki No 2 is an iteration of one Walters’ best-known images of the decade. The immaculately executed gouache-on-paper relates to, and was made in preparation for, the artist’s well-known screen print, conclusively titled Tamaki. Accordingly, this work shares the same palette and composition as the screen print, which was produced to a poster-like scale in an edition of 50. Unlike the artist’s ‘koru’ paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, which were typified by their uniform bands of binary colour, the artist’s paintings from the 1980s featured koru motifs variously repeated in different sizes. Paintings like Study for Tamaki No 2 sought to investigate both the formal and symbolic potential of the artist’s ‘koru’ device in greater depth,

from vantages that were previously unexplored.

In its traditional use in Maori decorative art, the koru served as a symbol for both new life and regeneration in the natural world. While Walters insisted that his paintings had no meaning or narrative that extended beyond their concrete appearance, his earlier use the of the koru certainly spoke to its traditional symbolic use—his pictorial strategy relied upon the fact that every iteration of the device was, in one way or another, connected. In Study for Tamaki No 2, fields of repeated, interwoven ‘koru’ motifs are still present (in the upper-left and lower-right corners). However the artist’s inclusion of two enlarged iterations of the device (in the upper-right and lowerleft corners), invites closer examination of the often-repeated form, which is simply an intersection of horizontal and circular lines.

In spite of the fact that Walters insisted that his paintings had no greater meaning, Study for Tamaki No 2 appears to draw the viewer’s attention to the fact that, in spite of its complexity, the natural world is governed by a very simple set of rules.

Walters was a famously methodical artist. He worked through his ideas thoroughly, using sketches and fully resolved studies (such as this) before moving on to larger works or extensive print runs. In addition, he took great care to ensure that (aside from minor sleights of hand) his paintwork was perfectly executed. Unlike his PVA (an early form of acrylic paint) paintings on stretched canvas, the artist’s celebrated gouaches offer a rare insight into his method and technique—a close look will reveal miniature variances in paint coverage that follow the path of the brush.

See Gordon Walters, Untitled, 1955, oil on canvas, 510mm x 606mm. The University of Auckland Art Collection.

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10w Bill Hammond Swollen River acrylic on paper signed W.D Hammond and dated 1997 in brushpoint lower right and inscribed Swollen River in brushpoint upper edge 1390mm x 1320mm ESTIMATE $95,000 - $135,000

In this epic monochromatic painting by Bill Hammond, a terrible calamity is looming.

Land occupied by a riverside community of Hammond’s mythical bird-people is in the process of being engulfed by an ecological catastrophe. The banks of the mighty river on which the bird-people subsist have burst, forcing them to seek refuge from on high ground.

On the horizon, Hammond’s signature dripping paint forms a volatile climate divided into three parts. Above the jagged contours of a range of barren mountains, opaque jet-black clouds obscure the light of a waning sun while supporting heavy columns of dark water pouring towards the ground. Behind the mountains, in the far distance, a row of delicately painted smoke plumes—mushroom clouds of the impend-

ing disaster—silently explode into the atmosphere. On the far right, at the edges of the land inhabited by Hammond’s mythical bird-people, the dark sky is clear—or at least as clear as the inhospitable environment allows.

On the edge of the riverbank, huddled together and jostling against one another, a flock of closely related species—interrupted by the occasional presence of a horse— stand, with their beaks focused in the same direction. From the left edge of the picture plane, a lone rider, slowly trotting through the swollen river, marks whatever the unpainted event is that has their complete attention. This unpainted event is perhaps another group seeking refuge after evacuating from an area lacking high ground; a messenger whom the group has sent out,

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returning with news from beyond their borders; or the dark harbingers of whatever misfortune is about to befall their community. Swollen River is Bill Hammond at his darkest.

In previous paintings, such as Buller’s Table Cloth (1994) or Watching for Buller, Final Scene Coastwatchers (1994), Hammond dramatises the actions of Victorian ornithologist Sir Walter Lawry Buller to produce an allegory of the nineteenth century devastation to New Zealand’s avian life as a result of European settlement and the introduction of foreign species. Swollen River is a post-apocalyptic symbol of the aftermath of this devastation but also a prediction of potential future disaster to any environment subject to the whims of a dominant species.

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11 Liz Maw Daughter of Cain, Lover of Judas oil on board signed Liz Maw and dated 06 in brushpoint lower right 1000mm x 1000mm EXHIBITED Ivan Anthony, 2006 ESTIMATE $24,000 - $29,000

Against a backdrop appropriated from the oeuvre of Baroque French painter Claude Lorrain, Liz Maw’s Daughter of Cain, Lover of Judas presents three characters—Aura, Jesus and Pan—all previously portrayed in Maw’s singular portraits. While these characters were previously presented as silhouetted deities floating against a stark background, Maw has re-introduced these characters in this painting, inserting them within a greater narrative.

Maw’s portraits, whether of individuals known personally by the artist or of known public figures, explicitly reference popular culture, creating images charged with meaning. Jesus is a portrait of Ted Neely, who, in 1973, portrayed the titular character in Jesus Christ Superstar. The portrayal of fellow artist Andrew McLeod as a mythological satyr is also present. The cerulean figure, kneeling like a nude pilgrim before Jesus, is a recurrent figure throughout Maw’s oeuvre. Appearing, thus far, in at least ten works, Maw’s meticulous, obsessively repetitive depictions of her, provide, what would otherwise be an anonymous subject, presence and history. She is a mythical, distorted symbol, replete with references to the postmodern condition of idolatry as well as imbued with an enchanting and alluring quality, transforming her into a symbol of fetish and obsession with perfection and beauty. In Maw’s continuous rendering of her, she is portrayed as desire. Her smooth, glistening limbs, and perfectly lustrous hair are echoed in the twinkling, Gothic building located in the background. Based on the High Cathedral of Saint Peter and Mary in Cologne, the embellished, gleaming points of the

spires of the cathedral serve to provide a visual counterpoint to the surrounding landscape.

The composition of Daughter of Cain, Lover of Judas suggests that Maw’s earlier portraits did not exist in isolation, but are actually located within the context of a greater narrative. This is certainly true of Aura, whose re-presentation draws together postmodern and post-feminist discourse around sexuality and representation of the female form. In addition, the depiction of Jesus references the rich historical tradition not just of portraiture, but also of religious iconography. Maw amalgamates the knowledge of iconography that she acquired as a result of her Catholic upbringing with a kitsch sensibility, creating a contemporary icon who would not look out of place above an altar, nor as the subject of a velvet painting. Maw’s portrayal of Jesus is airbrushed and immaculate, drawing attention to the unattainable ideal of beauty, yet by basing her portrait on an icon of popular culture, she incorporates the tension between high and low art into the work. Although presented here in a dramatic mise-en-scene, the portraits in Daughter of Cain, Lover of Judas, can all be read within the wider narrative context of Maw’s oeuvre.

Other portrait works have explicitly referenced art, music and popular culture, depicting such individuals as Robert Plant and David Attenborough and fellow artists Bill Hammond and Francis Upritchard, utilising the reputation and charisma of each subject, and transposing these qualities into the physical concept and meaning of the work.

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12 Ralph Hotere Port Chalmers Painting 77 brolite enamel on board signed Hotere and dated Port Chalmers ‘77 in brushpoint verso; inscribed Title “Port Chalmers Painting 77” Price $600 in graphite verso 1180mm x 810mm ESTIMATE $85,000 - $100,000

Painted with meticulous precision, Ralph Hotere’s Port Chalmers Painting 77 resonates with a richness of potential symbolism, association and allegory. The compositional simplicity of the piece channels the viewer’s focus to the materiality of the work, as well as to the delicate balance that Hotere weaves between the sleek, glossy fragments and the two areas of text. Executed with silky swathes of brolite lacquer on hardboard, Port Chalmers Painting 77 is punctuated by a thinly incised circle that extends to the outer reaches of the work. Featuring a soft shade of burnished auburn, the background plane is finished with a highly polished, seductive surface that is completely devoid of any textural or figurative detailing. This is not an empty void, however; as in Hotere’s other lacquer works, part of the enticing beauty of the present painting is that it interacts with its immediate environment. Registering shifts in light and changes in time, as well as reflecting the presence of objects that are in close proximity to it, the surface of Port Chalmers Painting 77 is constantly changing as it forms and reforms a fragile and transient dialogue with the world beyond.

Hotere’s use of the circle furnishes the painting with a host of possible significance and meaning. As a time-honoured symbol of unity, new life, regeneration, wholeness and infinity, the circle is a potent motif that crosses the boundaries of culture, geography and even time. It seems to have held a personal significance for Hotere, as it has repeatedly punctuated his oeuvre, appearing in the Black Paintings of the late 1960s, dominating the entire series of the Malady paintings from the early 1970s and reappearing in such monumental pieces as The Flight of the Godwit from 1977. In all of these works and in Port Chalmers Painting 77, Hotere’s use of the circle remains elusive and enigmatic. It functions as a visually and symbolically compelling motif, yet without prescription; it serves to open Hotere’s paintings to a host of discursive nexus and personal interpretations. Perhaps that is part of their lyrical charm.

On a formal level, the two circles serve to energise and illuminate the painting as their mottled interiors contain an embedded lustre.

In this manner, while the smooth, glassy portion of Port Chalmers Painting 77 successfully elicits a level of dynamism from the external world, the two orbs, by contrast, demarcate sections of robust internal activity. The raw vitality of the dappled segments strikes a discreet and restorative balance with the elegant and glossy surroundings. As such, like all of Hotere’s lacquer paintings, the graceful honeyed depths of Port Chalmers Painting 77 visually accommodate and reflect the spectator, while the inclusion of shadowy passages encourages metaphorical considerations. The divergence in treatment and the layers of meaning present in Port Chalmers Painting 77 speak volumes about Hotere’s mastery of formalist elements, such as paint and compositional structure, while also underscoring his unique ability to understand and communicate the beauty and importance of silence, intrigue and individual contemplation.

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13 Charles Frederick Goldie A Happy Thought’, Te Aitu te Irikau, A Noted Arawa Chieftainess oil on canvas signed C. F. Goldie and dated 1922 in brushpoint upper right; inscribed “A Happy Thought”, Te Aitu te Irikau, A Noted Arawa Chieftainess in ink on original artist label affixed verso and inscribed “A Happy Thought”, Te Aitu te Irikau, A Noted Arawa Chieftainess in ink on stretcher verso 265mm x 210mm PROVENANCE Private Collection, Lower North Island, Purchased by the previous owner in 1978.

Purchased by the current owner from Webb’s in 2009.

EXHIBITED Auckland City Art Gallery 1929 - 1944; Wairarapa Art Exhibition, September 1962.

ILLUSTRATED 2 September 1961; Wairarapa Art Exhibition September 1962 (Cover); Taylor, Alister and Jan Glen, CF Goldie 1870 - 1947 His Life and Painting, Auckland, 1977, p.262 ESTIMATE $190,000 - $240,000

A Happy Thought is the title Goldie gave to this version of his painting of Te Aitu Te Irikau, a Te Arawa chieftainess about whom little is known. Goldie painted at least eight portraits of her, the first in 1911 and this, the last, in 1922. All of them show her as an elderly lady with short, grey hair, and all show only her head and shoulders without the bust and hands. Compared with the other versions, this is the most reductive and has a plain background. But her chin moko, cloak, shark’s tooth earring, huia feather in her hair and greenstone hei tiki around her neck add up to a comprehensive list of attributes that confer status on the sitter.

Goldie must have been attracted to Te Aitu Te Irikau because she met his artistic requirements, not because she was famous in her own right. His pictures of her are vehicles for his ideas about older Maori people as the last authentic survivors of a vanishing culture and lifestyle. Goldie’s liking for older Maori sitters was due, in part, to his interest in them as repositories of past values and customs and in their mana as respected members of their society. Also, they were good subjects for conveying sentimental ideas about the passing of time and the dramatic change from Maori to European values and customs. A Happy Thought implies that the sitter, whose eyes are nearly closed, is reflecting on the past, when she was young and free of the insecurities of old age and rapid cultural changes. Her thoughts contrast with her present state; she appears old, tired and far from happy.

As a painter, Goldie enjoys the treatment of texture, as we see in the wrinkled skin where each crease seems to invite our touch as well as our gaze. The chiselled moko MICHAEL DUNN

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adds to this tactile dimension as do the huia feather and the hard surfaces of the greenstone hei tiki. He also uses a strong chiaroscuro to model the volumes of the head which appear very close to the viewer. The directional lighting (from the viewer’s right) casts a deep shadow on the side of the face and a small shadow below the tiki which gives an appearance of verisimilitude. However, the shadowy parts of the head here, as in the popular Rembrandt studies of old age, symbolise also the passing of time and foreshadow the darkness of death. The painting becomes a reflection on human mortality.

Everything about this work is carefully calculated. Goldie probably used studio props, like the cloak and huia feather, rather than having the subject bring the items to his studio. This is confirmed by the variation between items in the various portraits of her. To Goldie, the look of the work was more important than absolute authenticity. It is also unlikely that he had Te Aitu Te Irikau pose for this version, which is the last he painted of her. It resembles an earlier one dated 1919 in which she faces the other way. It is identical in composition, though not in every detail. Goldie would have had studies and even photographic records for reference when making later variations of a subject such as this one. The Te Arawa tribe was centred on Rotorua and the nearby lakes, an area Goldie had visited on a number of occasions earlier in his life and from which he drew a number of sitters.

This is a typical example of Goldie’s portraits of older Maori kuia and is in excellent condition.

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14w Bill Hammond House and Garden acrylic on canvas signed WD Hammond and dated 2000 in brushpoint lower edge; inscribed House and Garden in brushpoint upper right 1735mm x 2140mm ESTIMATE $200,000 - $250,000

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This monochromatic scene is upstaged by an area of acid greens, suggesting the lush dampness under a forest canopy, or even a scene submerged in water, replenished by the clouds that float amongst the plants, trees and anthropomorphic bird creatures that inhabit it.

Bill Hammond’s large acrylic painting House and Garden undermines the comfortable familiarity of its title. Neither the interior scene nor the garden beyond relate to the upmarket lifestyle images one might expect to find in a glossy magazine. This is a unique world of Hammond’s imagining.

Hammond’s earlier works picture the dystopia of the modern metropolis—innercity life, with sleazy hotels, bars and billiard rooms. The characters populating these paintings may seem decadent, yet they have an appealing vitality because they are depicted with the verve and directness of cartoon illustrations or graffiti. His later paintings came to depict a very different universe, born after Hammond’s visit to Auckland Island as part of the sub-Antarctic project in 1989. There he found a domain uninhabited by humans, where plants and birds flourished, untouched by civilisation. To him it was a paradisal realm, Eden before the fall, such as he imagined New Zealand might have been before human settlement. Drawing also on Buller’s ornithology, Hammond created a prelapsarian world in his paintings, inhabited by upright avian beings that take up occupation amidst the remnants of his earlier degenerate cities and, increasingly, inhabit silent, verdant landscapes of tall trees, ferns and waterways.

House and Garden has particular interest because it brings these two pictorial worlds together on the same canvas. A white area defined by a low parapet, set at an angle to the back wall, suggests a rectangular room. It is sparsely furnished, but with a generous supply of power points connected

by trailing wires to sundry modern appliances – a television mounted on the wall next to a trophy bird, and amplifiers on the floor, evidently being used by a tiny figure.

Some unrecognisable instrument, perhaps a keyboard, perches in front of a large personage seated on the right, more avatar than human, who seems about to engage with it.

Although they might communicate electronically, the forms within the white space are detached and isolated, sharing only the white space they occupy and the fugitive shades of black and grey that define them.

This monochromatic scene is upstaged by an area of acid greens, suggesting the lush dampness under a forest canopy, or even a scene submerged in water, replenished by the clouds that float amongst the plants, trees and anthropomorphic bird creatures that inhabit it. Although the greenness might suggest that we are looking out from a house through a plate glass window into a garden, as the work’s title seems to indicate, the aquatic implications conjure up the idea of an enormous fish tank built into the wall.

The notion is reinforced by Hammond’s hallmark trails of paint that seem here to seep from the tank, presaging that the green world will engulf the white. The bird creatures may be collectables for a hobbyist, like tropical fish, ornithological interests replacing ichthyological. But the shadowy humans are disempowered by the vivid universe of the birds with their admirable social habits—‘MATING FOR LIFE’, according to Hammond’s inscription. It seems that the watery Eden, more idyllic than threatening, will prevail.

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Grahame Sydney’s landscapes are much admired because the subject matter is so readily recognisable and the style so accessible – they are as realistic as good photographs, some would say.

Homestead with Mt Ida is an excellent example of Grahame Sydney’s landscape art, the genre for which he is best known, although his oeuvre encompasses many other subjects, notably figure studies and portraits. His landscapes are much admired because the subject matter is so readily recognisable and the style so accessible – they are as realistic as good photographs, some would say.

But this description falls short of the mark. His paintings are not simply straightforward ‘copies’ of familiar New Zealand scenes. If that were the case, how could we explain why they are immediately identifiable as coming from the hand of Grahame Sydney?

Such a question gives us pause to stop and examine Sydney’s approach to landscape painting more closely. Our attention is first caught by the characteristic high skill that he brings to his canvases. While Homestead with Mt Ida is in oil, not in the distinctive tempera medium he taught himself, he has deployed the same meticulous and painstaking approach. It produces a faultless surface where the mark of the maker is not allowed to intrude, and the subject depicted commands our full concentration.

Sydney’s subjects are not arbitrary choices of popular scenic vistas: they depend on his intimate acquaintance with Central Otago where he lives. The intense observation to which he has subjected its vast, austere beauty endows his paintings with a compelling authenticity. No aspect seems too trivial to merit his attention, yet his works are not preoccupied with minutiae. Rather, they offer us a sense of the broad sweep of the land, a quality even stronger in Homestead with Mt Ida because of the unifying

blanket of snow. Like his other landscapes, it is empty of human beings, and lacks even traces of their passing, as implied by the road in an earlier painting of the area, Road West, Ida Valley. The only sign of human occupation is the small, dark form of a simple homestead with outbuildings. But it denies any narrative: there is no sign of habitation, no pathway to it, and no light in the windows. It is as desolate as the abandoned huts of South Pole expeditions that Sydney photographed on visits to Antarctica in 2003 and 2006.

Comparisons with Sydney’s photographs highlight the distinctive quality of his paintings. Homestead with Mt Ida shares a reduced palette with the Antarctic photographs because of the covering of snow. But the white mantle in the painting has been carefully orchestrated. The vibrant blue of a near cloudless New Zealand sky resonates in the snow beneath, capturing a muted brilliance. The light also infuses the pure white drifts, lending them a warmer tint, which is echoed in the glow behind the distant mountain range on the right. Any danger that such a harmonious palette might create too uniform a scene is avoided by the careful placement of the brown-toned homestead and the long blue shadow it casts, which provides a focal point that anchors the composition.

Sydney’s painted landscapes are far more than merely realistic: they rely on a very personal knowledge of particular landscapes, which he makes his own through his masterful control of composition and colour.

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15 Grahame Sydney Homestead with Mt Ida oil on canvas signed Grahame Sydney and dated 2004 in brushpoint lower left; signed Grahame Sydney, dated Š2004 and inscribed Homestead with Mt Ida, Cambrian Valley, Otago, NZ in brushpoint verso 650mm x 1010mm ESTIMATE $70,000 - $85,000

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16 Andrew McLeod Landscape with Rainbow oil on canvas signed A. McLeod and dated 13 in brushpoint lower right 1185mm x 1790mm ESTIMATE $22,000 - $32,000

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17 Francis Upritchard Flock Bottles polymer clay, hand-blown glass bottles 590mm x 285mm x 285mm; 430mm x 160mm x 160mm; 445mm x 180mm x 180mm ESTIMATE $30,000 - $40,000

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18w Peter Stichbury Daniel Roche acrylic on linen signed Peter Stichbury, dated 2011 and inscribed ‘ Daniel Roche’, Acrylic on Linen in brushpoint verso; Tracey Williams Gallery label affixed verso 1000mm x 800mm ESTIMATE $40,000 - $50,000 50

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19 John Walsh Deregulation Debate oil on board signed J. Walsh, dated 2005 and inscribed Deregulation Debate verso 890mm x 1190mm ESTIMATE $14,000 - $20,0000

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20 Michael Smither Kawaroa Paddling Pool oil on board signed MDS and dated 1998 in brushpoint lower left 1200mm x 1790mm ESTIMATE $100,000 - $150,000

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Smither operates with an uncompromising attention to detail, which produces an almost palpable sense of reality.

Each individual stone in Kawaroa Paddling Pool is carefully delineated, and the relationships between objects are conscientiously marked out.

Born in New Plymouth, Smither spent a significant portion of time exploring the rocky coastal environments of the Taranaki region, so it is perhaps unsurprising that fragments of the area consistently haunt his work. What Ron Brownson has designated “rock- or shore-scapes”1 comprise a large portion of Smither’s oeuvre, and some of his most iconic and celebrated paintings feature the smooth, ovoid rocks and watery vistas of Taranaki. In Kawaroa Paddling Pool, we are immediately cast back into the recesses of Smither’s childhood, where we are greeted by a sharply rectangular pool of water that is framed by a nest of round glossy stones. The scene is elegantly calm and serene, seemingly removed from the possible ravages and disruption of wind, humanity and even time. Sunlight beams down, bathing the scene with a startling clarity, and the flawless mirror finish of the water allows us to peer down to the tightly packed crowd of small purplish pebbles below.

Smither’s use of an extremely close

vantage point, tilted perspective and tight cropping imparts a sense that these sleekly polished blue-green rocks extend endlessly beyond the confines of the canvas edge. And indeed, the use of unusual and somewhat skewed viewpoints is characteristic of much of Smither’s work; in Kawaroa Paddling Pool, it has the effect of making us, the viewers, feel as though we are right there on the rocks, standing a few feet from the pool and yet, at the same time, we tower over it in order to peer into its stony depths.

Smither operates with an uncompromising attention to detail, which produces an almost palpable sense of reality. Each individual stone in Kawaroa Paddling Pool is carefully delineated, and the relationships between objects are conscientiously marked out. This is mimesis at its best: when nature appears to have been grafted onto the canvas and lies there quiet and still, for the contemplative perusal of the spectator. It is, however, Smither’s very personalised snapshot of nature. His

paintings are never merely representational as his use of feathery, velveteen strokes of paint together with intensified colours results in a highly stylised and heightened sense of naturalism. Here, in Kawaroa Paddling Pool, Smither’s distinctive vision and technique transform a potentially banal, simple subject into a scene that is burnished with a radiant chimerical gloss so that, while being possessed of familiarity, it is also redolent with possibility, with mystery and with a fantastical strangeness.

At the heart of this painting then, we are greeted with Smither’s artistic alchemy that graces much of his best work: his unflinching ability to record his immediate surroundings through a personalised lens of mysticism and memory, and a poetic beauty that extends beyond his work and beyond the designation of straightforward realist painting.

1 Ron Brownson, Michael Smither: The Wonder Years (Auckland, 2005), 14.

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21 Ralph Hotere Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro acrylic and gold leaf on burnished steel and board in Colonial villa sash frame signed Hotere and dated ‘91 in ink lower right; inscribed Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro in ink lower left 1120mm x 910mm ESTIMATE $70,000 - $100,000

This particular piece is one of the earliest examples from the series Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro, which is now regarded to be one of the most iconic series in Ralph Hotere’s extensive oeuvre. Various examples of this series can be found in leading national intuitions. As previously noted, the phrase Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro can mean ‘Black over Gold’ or ‘What about the Black Gold?’ Both of these interpretations mark a shift and a maturation within Hotere’s then new and established ideological concerns and artistic processes.

In this series, the idea that a painting is a window to the world is given a metaphysical interpretation. Using the same materials on each work within the series, Hotere creates a world that resonates with a quietly complex spirituality. Black is a colour long associated with the artist, and, in this piece, the hue is being applied with a paradoxical hand, as it both obscures and enhances a quest for enlightenment. The pristine velour of the black edging of the window frame is seen juxtaposed against

the colour applied with an almost expressionistic vigour in the upper section and the body of the work. Through this juxtaposition, Hotere references some of his most celebrated processes in his oeuvre.

These are further enhanced by the squares of gold leaf that radiate through the darkness, their smoky glow suggesting a candlelit Mass.

Gregory O’ Brien wrote that Hotere’s upbringing was a ‘hybridised Maori Catholic tradition’.1 It arguably offered the inspiration for creating a stable of reoccurring symbols that could take on multiple meanings. One of the most significant symbols for Hotere was the cross, which is featured here. The cross is suspended in negative space and is created using sparingly applied colour, giving it an otherworldly allure that is emphasised by the delicate halo of dots that circumnavigate it. Here, Hotere’s well-documented use of reflective surfaces allows the viewers entry into the work to consider its wider issues in relation to their own life.

However, this work is arguably somewhat earthbound, as elements of it are evocative of a landscape, particularly compositionally. Inspired by the Catholic scholar Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hotere stressed the importance of a symbiotic relationship between humanity and the natural world.

Furthermore, a nod to his activist past could be made with the interpretation of the series title to mean ‘What about the Black Gold?’ as Hotere famously opposed any mining and oil extraction that impacted the environment.

This work and its series highlight salient concerns that crop up throughout Hotere’s oeuvre. He skillfully articulates them by amalgamating his to-date trademarks to create works that are elegantly held together with paradoxes. His distinctly modernist aesthetic illustrates both existential and physical concerns to create art that is both of this land and of this world.

1 Ralph Hotere: Black Light, Major Works Including Collaborations with Bill Cuthbert, (Te Papa Press/Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Wellington & Dunedin 2000), p 27.

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It is a character study more than an itemisation of artefacts, encouraging us to empathise with the elderly sitter, alone with her thoughts.

22w Charles Frederick Goldie Harata Rewiri Tarapata oil on canvas signed C.F. Goldie and dated 1936 in brushpoint upper left; inscribed Harata, widow of Chief Paul, Orakei, Harata Rewiri Tarapata, Widow of Chief Paul Te Tuhaere of Orakei in ink verso 355mm x 255mm PROVENANCE Private collection Melbourne.

Purchased International Art Centre Major Fine Art Auction 25 July 2002 (lot. 61) and resold privately to the current owner in 2004. Private Collection Dunedin, purchased Webb’s 24 July 1985 (lot. 121).

ESTIMATE $180,000 - $240,000

Early in his career, Goldie painted several highly finished portraits of Harata Rewiri Tarapata, when she was still alive and could pose for him. The most important of these is the large oil painting called The Widow (1903)—now in Te Papa—which was gifted to the Countess of Ranfurly when her husband finished his term as governor-general.

The Widow shows Harata Rewiri Tarapata in a whare, with the dying embers of a fire, reflecting upon her late husband, Paore Tuhaere, a prominent chief who died in 1892.

It is a meticulously painted work, full of ethnographic information and shows Harata Rewiri Tarapata as a dignified and sorrowful widow. At about this time, Goldie made a number of fine Conté sketches of her, which still survive. He must have sketched these as preparatory studies for his final oil paintings of her.

The current painting, dated 1939, was made much later, when the sitter must have passed away. It is more sketch-like than the earlier paintings, and indeed, parts of the canvas are left unpainted. Goldie probably turned to his early sketches for this informal image of Harata Rewiri turned away from the viewer while smoking a pipe. Goldie has registered the face and pipe in sharper focus than the neck scarf and smock, which appear blurred and incomplete. This gives us an insight into the making of the portrait and allows us to participate in the process. It is a character study more than an itemisation of artefacts, encouraging us MICHAEL DUNN

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to empathise with the elderly sitter, alone with her thoughts. The pipe was smoked by many elderly kuia at a time when the practice was unacceptable for the majority of European women. Presumably, this was a characteristic pose for the sitter, who also smokes a pipe in an earlier portrait dated 1904, with the title Meditation. By showing her smoking a pipe, Goldie gives an historical dimension to the work, which records a typical pastime among Maori women at the turn of the century, when his original sketches of her were made.

It is possible to see her pose, turning away from the viewer—who, at the time of execution, was usually European—and her pensive look as a retreat from the present realities of a rapidly changing society and turned towards thoughts of her earlier days as the wife of an influential Auckland chief.

The smoke from her pipe is ephemeral and can be read as a further reference to the passing of time and of life itself. Goldie treats his subject with respect for her age and her status as a venerable widow.

Goldie executed the portrait with a pronounced chiaroscuro—light comes from the viewer’s left and casts a strong shadow from the pipe onto her chin; it also throws the side and back of her head into deep shadow.

This contributes to the three-dimensional qualities of the head and gives the portrait a realistic presence. Colour is found only in the green neck scarf and the silver hair, and this fits the reflective mood of the subject.

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Depicting an isolated bay at the end of the Aupouri Peninsula, near the northern tip of New Zealand’s North Island, Spirits Bay marries a number of influences to create a multifaceted narrative. By way of its physicality and scale, the work envelops the viewer in a rich, contemplative and visceral experience The painting can assume a number of different meanings, depending on the perspective of the viewer. In Cotton’s works from this series, images coalesce in an otherworldly realm, simultaneously structured and deconstructed. Indeterminate and organic in structure, the paintings come across as ephemeral dreamscapes, making even greater allowance for the role of chance and the subconscious, not only in the viewer’s determination of meaning but in the artist’s actual construction of the image. With this compelling combination of colours and imagery, Spirits Bay seems exempt from the constraints of time and space.

Contrasting Christian symbolism with Maori imagery, Shane Cotton seeks to draw

parallels between the customs of his own iwi, Ngapuhi, and those of the European settlers, creating what he has referred to as a “bi-spirituality”. It represents a nexus between the single Christian God and the gods and atua of Maori cosmology, This linkage is clearly influenced by his investigations whilst teaching at Massey University of the local history of the Bible and its distribution by nineteenth-century missionaries, as well as how this sacred text was adopted and adapted by local Maori.

The striking disconnects between palate and object marks a division between dark and light, mischievous and somber, and the land, sea and sky. The gliding, wheeling birds represent the spirituality of the tangata whenua, while the cliff form serves as a distant reminder of a subject—the ownership of land— that was once integral to the artist’s practice. Illuminated fields of misty white and earthy tones reveal distant fragments of mountainscapes that map several of New Zealand’s iconic ranges, elegantly alluding to New Zealand’s unique cultural ties to the land.

RICHARD MILSOM

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23w Shane Cotton Spirits Bay acrylic on canvas signed Cotton and dated 2002-2004 in brushpoint lower right 1900mm x 3000mm ESTIMATE $100,000 - $150,000

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24w Ralph Hotere Green lacquer on corrugated iron with cast pewter moldings signed Hotere, dated Port Chalmers ’97 and inscribed Green in brushpoint verso 2000mm x 855mm (each); 2000mm x 1710mm (overall) ESTIMATE $75,000 - $100,000

Born of the dynamic and demonstrative three-dimensionality afforded by corrugated iron, Green rhythmically lurches 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 as if dotted along a landscape, at once offering a visual anchor and a sense of utility that recalls the function of corrugated iron.

The two exacting horizontal incisions, which carve out strips in the corrugated iron, appear to have been frozen in a moment of growth, arrested and yet threatening to continue razing its way across the metal. The lines intersect with the space between the two panels to compose the unmistakable shape of a cross: a form composed of negative space and holding a timeless, spaceless resonance, whilst closely aligned to and recalling the charged imagery of the crucifix. A critical dialogue, the work highlights the politics of the marginalisation of Māori in New Zealand and goes to the heart of Hotere’s artistic ethos. The strips both create a powerful negative space dividing the work and mark a glaring gash in the rippling perfection of the sheet of iron, serving as a powerful national metaphor for the physical act of bulldozing and defiling land.

Hotere’s awareness of broader European art-historical traditions and movements greatly influenced his work and shaped him as a master of minimalism, giving his artistic existence a wonderfully rich contextualisation that allowed him—as the first Māori painter to have been included in a history of art—to develop a biculturally

integrated approach to his work. Green strongly recalls Italian spatialist Lucio Fontana’s concetto spaziale works in that the emotive potency exists not in the work’s physicality but in the absence of space created by the iconoclastic act of cutting the canvas. It is such potency of anti-form that makes the present work of Hotere great.

The desecration and division of the iron also constitutes an articulation of the implied action in his earlier geometric works, in which perfectly slit crosses appeared to pierce through the canvas (such as Red on Black, 1969, in the collection of Auckland Art Gallery).

Despite the consciousness of European form and tradition that 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 Māori painting, the sobriety of his palette reflecting colours associated with traditional Māori art. The unravelling of the horizontal strip of metal across the canvas similarly offers a dynamicity of form that directly recalls the identifiably New Zealand image of an unfurling fern frond: a symbol of new life. Fundamentally, the very fabric of this work, corrugated iron, is also a typically New Zealand material that echoes the waves of the sea and calls to mind an explicitly local setting.

RACHEL KLEINSMAN

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25w Bill Hammond Whistler’s Mother 3 acrylic on canvas signed W.D. Hammond and dated 2000 in brushpoint lower left and inscribed Whistler’s Mother 3 in brushpoint upper left 1020mm x 770mm ESTIMATE $65,000 - $75,000

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26w Peter Robinson The Painting is Many Things acrylic on canvas 1000mm x 1000mm ESTIMATE $20,000 - $30,000

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27w Ralph Hotere Black Window: Nga Tamariki O Parewa acrylic on board in colonial villa sash window frame signed Hotere, dated Port Chalmers ‘82 and inscribed Black Window in brushpoint lower right 1225mm x 860mm ESTIMATE $160,000 - $180,000

Ralph Hotere’s Black Window series, to which Black Window: Nga Tamariki O Parewa belongs, found its impetus in a significant event in New Zealand’s cultural history: the Save Aramoana campaign that commenced in 1974 and stood in opposition to the planned construction of an aluminium smelter at the Aramoana settlement on the Otago Peninsula. The campaign was motivated by the fact that the development of the smelter would displace the communities of both Aramoana and the nearby village of Te Ngaru; it resulted in the settlement’s reactionary measure of declaring itself a sovereign state, a ‘micro nation’ with its own border posts and passports, on 23 December 1980. The campaign would eventually prevail over the plans to build the smelter. To Hotere, the events that unfolded in Aramoana were significant not because a small community eventually triumphed over a much-larger oppressor but, rather, because the campaign’s central concern was the right of an indigenous community to self-determination. In Hotere’s work, the references to Aramoana do not simply refer to a conflict over an aluminium smelter; instead, the Aramoana threat was emblematic of the plight that the tangata whenua continue to face under the system of governance imposed by the Treaty of Waitangi.

Like a functional architectural window, Black Window: Nga Tamariki O Parewa seeks to present the viewer with a carefully selected vantage to a world outside of their own immediate physical environment. The work presents a bleak outlook, circumscribed by white line and text and dominated by an unmercifully applied black ground. While the curved white line in the upper portion of the picture plane presents a horizon, the central cross form plays to the figuration’s traditional symbolic readings: it functions both as a reference to cardinal points and as a representation of the unity between divinity (the vertical line) and the physical world (the horizontal line). The colour black has a ubiquitous presence in Hotere’s practice—the artist’s friend and colleague, Hone Tuwhare, refers to its presence as a ‘visual kind of starvation’1—and in Black Window: Nga Tamariki O Parewa, the dark matter is held up like a blockade and denies the viewer any scenery or perspective.

While Ralph Hotere’s practice is deeply politicised, it was not until the early 1980s, when his Black Window series was produced, that he openly engaged with contemporary political discourse.

Prior to this, the concerns echoed by Black Window: Nga Tamariki O Parewa were still present; however, they were often hidden behind a complex set of reference points. For example, Hotere’s Black Paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s engaged with the aroha of the tangata whenua by constructing a waiata from abstract visual harmonics and his Sangro series of the late 1970s engaged with the issue of self-determination by recalling the death of his brother Jack in the Second Word War. Hotere’s Black Window paintings were a departure from his earlier practice because their message was not infused with lush visual heraldry. Rather than quietly persuading the viewer about the merits of its cause, Black Window: Nga Tamariki O Parewa gives physical form to the power relationship that is the basis of New Zealand’s nationhood.

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Tuwhare, Hone. Deep River Talk: Collected Poems (Auckland: Godwit Press, 1993), p. 51.

CHARLES NINOW

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28w Milan Mrkusich Painting (Meta Grey) 1974 acrylic on canvas signed Mrkusich, dated ‘74 and inscribed Painting (Meta Grey) 1974 in ink verso 1720mm x 1720mm ILLUSTRATED Wright, Alan, Edward Hanfling, Mrkusich: the art of transformation, Auckland: Auckland University Press, plate 65.

ESTIMATE $75,000 - $95,000

Milan Mrkusich’s Meta Grey series, started in 1969, is a natural evolution from the artist’s Corner Paintings. Both share a concern with the exploration of the relationship among hue, saturation and brightness, rather than space or form, with a perverse emphasis on the periphery of the canvas, rather than the centre. When Painting (Meta Grey) 1974 was painted, the artist had already been the subject of a major retrospective at Auckland City Art Gallery two years earlier and had become a well-established figure in New Zealand art, easily the equal of the American colour field painters in his absolute mastery of flatness to bring out the autonomy of colour and to reject, once and for all, the idea of a painting as simply an illusory window through which to look.

This work is from the earlier part of the series in which fields of ambiguous, achromatic grey predominate. Later, Mrkusich would darken the grey to the extreme of black (grey is only a lighter shade of black anyway) and heighten the counterpoint-

ing colour elements. In this earlier work, however, the artist creates a kind of grisaille geometric abstract, which invites viewers to examine the optical and tonal values of a shade of grey as it metamorphoses across the surface of the canvas, contrasted to two lighter and two darker greys daintily dipped in the corners, like in a black-and-white photograph in an old-fashioned album. A clinically rational philosophical essay in surface, the colour grey in (or rather, on) the painting ceases to be merely a compositional element, the desaturation of a hue or the mixing of two complementary ones.

Instead, it becomes both the subject and object en soi, like the ‘little patch of yellow wall’ in Vermeer’s View of Delft that consumes Bergotte’s final moments in Proust.

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the twentieth century been associated with boredom, depression, old age, ambiguity, sterility, conformity and other negative values. Indeed, as Eva Heller points out in her 2009 Psychologie de la Couleur—Effets et Symboliques, only a measly 1% polled in surveys conducted in Europe and North America gave grey as their favourite colour.

The painting causes viewers to rethink their prejudices about this anti-colour in a bravura act rarely seen outside Josef Albers’ Grey Instrumentation paintings from the same time and other historical figurative novelties by Corot, Whistler and Caspar David Friedrich.

Friedrich is not mentioned randomly.

In all abstract paintings, there is an echo of the Romantic in the artist’s hankering after the Sublime. ‘Meta’, after all, is Greek for ‘above’ or ‘beyond’, a code for transcendence and the rarefied superlunary realms to which abstraction aspires. In Mrkusich’s case, that Sublime is an infinite depth captured in an absolute flatness.

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29 Don Binney Te Henga oil on canvas signed Binney and dated 1971 in brushpoint upper right 610mm x 1012mm ESTIMATE $50,000 - $70,000

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The wild and weathered west coast of Auckland, and particularly that of Bethells Beach, has long since occupied the 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 iconic soaring birds, instead choosing to portray the vast beaches and sand dunes for which the area is renowned and which gave the area its name. Binney’s interest in the environment 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-edge style with flat passages of paint and sharp, crystalline outlines, Te Henga is firmly positioned in the distinctively clear and harsh light of the South Pacific. The centrally located headland of Te Henga, viewed from Old Man’s Head, is depicted in flat, even colour, providing a visual counterpoint to the densely striated lines of impasto of sea. The sinuous lines encasing the flattened blocks of colour guide the viewer’s eye through the painting, inviting a close examination of every brush stroke. The ebony outlines 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. Binney’s approach serves to highlight New Zealand’s unique landscape, as well as his reverence of its value as a pictorial subject.

The works from the Te Henga series could be viewed as the artist’s opus to a beloved area. Binney had an enduring and 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 bird-watching, alluding to Binney’s iconic bird paintings of the 1960s.

Te Henga is the result of the artist’s close examination of the landscape, evidenced through the careful refinement of forms, colours and lines, as combined with the elimination of superfluous details 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, as captured by Binney in his inimitable style.

ALEKSANDRA PETROVIC

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30 Ralph Hotere Mungo acrylic on board in Roger Hicken frame signed Hotere and dated Port Chalmers ’82 in brushpoint lower left and inscribed At Aramoana in brushpoint right edge 350mm x 325mm ESTIMATE $20,000 - $25,000 70

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31 Shane Cotton Welcome to the Garden acrylic on canvas signed S Cotton, dated 2000 and inscribed Welcome to the Garden in brushpoint upper edge 1680mm x 1070mm ESTIMATE $50,000 - $70,000 CATALOGUE 509

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32w Milan Mrkusich Chinese Elements Wood 1989 acrylic on canvas, four panels signed Mrkusich, dated ‘89 and inscribed Chinese Elements Wood 1989 in graphite verso 2210mm x 2083mm (widest points)

Mrkusich refused to be tied to the

EXHIBITED Chinese Elements, Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland, 18 April - 4 May 1990.

provincial nationalism colouring much

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His was an international vision.

Born in Dargaville in 1925 to Dalmatian immigrants, Milan Mrkusich is a prominent, senior New Zealand abstract painter.

Largely self-taught, he drew his earliest influences from the German Bauhaus architectural movement, preparing the ground for a career as a geometric abstractionist at a time when most of his modernist contemporaries (e.g. Colin McCahon, Toss Woollaston, Rita Angus) still referenced the regional concerns of the landscape. In sympathy with though separated by distance and poor magazines from the new abstract art coming from post-war New York, Mrkusich wanted to free art of deference to traditional figurative norms and the banalities of depicting the human world, to make literal Victorian aesthete Walter Pater’s assertion that ‘[a]ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.

Mrkusich refused to be tied to the provincial nationalism colouring much of New Zealand’s nascent art scene. His was an international vision. Throughout the 1960s, partly inspired by the currency of the geometric and metaphysical concepts in Jung’s Man and His Symbols (1964), the artist produced a number of works based around the idea of the Buddhist mandala of the squared circle. Later, monochrome and minimalism allowed colour and form to exist as objects in their own right. His path was rewarded in the 1970s when Mrkusich was taken up by Auckland dealer Petar Vuletic, a forthright disciple of American critic Clement Greenberg, with a stable of younger artists working in formal abstraction, including Stephen Bambury, Richard Killeen, Ian Scott and Geoff Thornley.

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of New Zealand’s nascent art scene.

Mrkusich continued to find inspiration in Eastern philosophy. In 1989, he undertook a series of paintings inspired by the Wu Xing, the five traditional Taoist elements of water, wood, fire, earth and metal. In Chinese tradition, these are the five basic substances that are eternally transformed into one another or combined in a harmonious balance to form the universe. The Chinese Elements paintings parallel this philosophy as modular, sculptural forms combining individual canvases of varying shape and size and mixing each element’s symbolic colours. The effect is not unlike that of Mondrian’s Neoplasticism, balancing colour intensity against surface area but interpreted through the lens of Taoist philosophy.

In the Chinese system, the element of wood corresponds to spring, growth and the ambiguous colour qing, which can refer to green, blue or teal. Mrkusich interprets this correspondence as a large square of richly worked green with yellow notes (symbolic of earth), which, for all of the artist’s eschewing of the local, perhaps has accidental suggestions of the dappled light in the canopy of native bush. The subdued greys and blacks of the other panels create fleeting retinal subtleties subservient to the green; cool, dry, conservative Yin tones blend with metal (white) and water (black) in counterpoint to the vigorous Yang of the focal square. As Confucius says in The Doctrine of the Mean (circa 500 BCE), ‘Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.’

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33 Pat Hanly Vacation Screen acrylic and enamel on board, three panels signed Hanly and dated 87 with incision upper right of middle panel 1845mm x 1920mm (overall) ESTIMATE $50,000 - $70,000

Sunlight, bright colours, nude figures in the open air, blue skies and a sparkling atmosphere all come together in this radiant work by Pat Hanly. It is easy to see why Hanly is a popular painter, as his work is largely free from the dark palette and angst so often found in contemporary New Zealand art. Painted on both sides of three, folding panels, Vacation Screen appears Matisse-like in its ease, opulence and apparently carefree beauty. It recalls Matisse’s cut-outs in the flat, silhouetted shapes of its motifs placed on the light-coloured ground. Both the black figures and the red nudes are replicated in different parts of the work, suggesting the use of stencils in their creation. Hanly floats his figures and motifs freely across the panels, linking them together by devices such as the sinuous line that provides a thread-like connection between them.

The screen is a relatively rare and informal format for a painter like Hanly to use and one that lends itself to the decorative deployment of shape and colour. Varying the shape and size of the panels contributes to variety for the viewer when moving around the work— as is required by its three-dimensional aspects. The panels create an environment for the holidaying figures to enjoy leisure and freedom from everyday behavioural constraints. This has to be a summer holiday near the beach. Such a screen, in practical terms, could provide privacy in the cramped quarters of a holiday home in which separate rooms and even doors can be in short supply. The screen titillates by its suggestion of secrecy and the need to hide or shield from view the private activities of its owner. Appropriately the screen has a playful lightness of spirit, which we see in the way the red nude figures turn the corner of the screen and appear on both sides in a cubist-like multiplicity of views.

The artist appears to have deliberately evoked the freshness and optimism of his famous Figures in Light series from the mid-1960s.

The flattened figures against the bright sunny background colours recall the earlier series, as does the effect of sharp sunlight. This is a kind of earthly paradise, but one that was then under threat of the deployment of nuclear-powered and missile-carrying American warships in the Pacific. Hanly and his family were actively involved in the protest movement, which led to the passing of legislation in that very year, 1987, making New Zealand a nuclear-free zone. Some have seen in the blazing red areas of colour and the two black figures references to the threat of nuclear war and the shadow it casts over the Pacific and its natural beauty. Thus it would be incorrect to see the work as purely hedonistic despite its many seductive qualities. Rather, it is thought-provoking and Hanly at his very best.

MICHAEL DUNN

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34 John Gully Maoris on the Greenstone Track watercolour on paper signed John Gully and dated 1878 in brushpoint lower left 350mm x 625mm ESTIMATE $20,000 - $30,000

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35 Shane Cotton Seven Sisters, White Cliffs acrylic on canvas signed SWC, dated 04 and inscribed Seven Sisters, White Cliffs in brushpoint lower right edge 750mm x 1100mm ESTIMATE $25,000 - $35,000

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As in so much of the artist’s work, there is a paradoxical quality to Pacific. It is not the minimalism or emptiness of the composition that first strikes the viewer—rather, it is the density and fullness. Yet the painting is nothing if not a stripping down of inner as well as outer reality.

36 John Drawbridge Pacific oil on canvas signed John Drawbridge, dated 1989 - 1999 and inscribed Pacific verso 1745mm x 1762mm ESTIMATE $20,000 - $30,000

It’s a question that has been around at least since the early 20th century: should we think of a painted canvas as an open window or as a flat panel—a segment of adjusted wall?

John Drawbridge’s Pacific (1995) is a graceful yet persuasive assertion that a painting can be both at once. Firstly, the painting offers a view seawards through an open door or window of the home studio at Island Bay, where the artist worked from 1963 until his death in 2005. Yet, with its flattened surface, painterly architecture and ambiguous tonings, the work speaks the formal language of the modernism he encountered in the galleries of London during formative years spent in the city from 1957 until 1963.

It was the oceanic as much as the terrestrial character of New Zealand that drew Drawbridge back to Wellington after four years at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts and then further studies in Paris.

Among his most considerable achievements in England were a number of meditations on the Pacific environment, prompted by homesickness, which he exhibited at London’s Redfern Gallery in 1963. Notable among them were two 1962 canvases: Bluescape (now in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) and Pacific Lagoon, which was featured in the 2011 Te Papa/City Gallery Wellington exhibition “Oceania—Imagining the Pacific”. In theme, spirit and visual language, Pacific (1995) is not only a reprise of these earlier works but also an extension of them.

While harking back to Ben Nicholson and the nature-derived abstractions of other St. Ives-based painters, Pacific summons the Romantic spirit he admired in Turner’s elemental conjurings and also in a work he knew from visits to Victoria University: Colin McCahon’s Storm Warning (1980–81).

Accordingly, Drawbridge’s oceanic painting is as wide-eyed and full-blooded as it is rigorous and painstaking.

For the 2001 survey exhibition at City Gallery Wellington, “John Drawbridge: Wide Open Interior”, Pacific was hung on a wall at the entrance. In that context, it was both a summation and a watershed, providing an eloquent link between the artist’s early oceanic abstractions and the increasingly sharp-edged geometric interiors of the 1990s and later.

As in so much of the artist’s work, there is a paradoxical quality to Pacific. It is not the minimalism or emptiness of the composition that first strikes the viewer—rather, it is the density and fullness. Yet the painting is nothing if not a stripping down of inner as well as outer reality. Such an oscillating outwardness and inwardness—equal parts looking and feeling—characterised much of Drawbridge’s work.

Flickering between day and night, near and far, and clarity and opacity, his paintings embody intuition and intellect as well as planning and improvisation. The works explore the subtlety and sensuality of the human condition while also returning to the bracing and often unforgiving environment outside the studio. Just as the process of art-making was in his bloodstream, so were the seawalls at Island Bay and the sea beyond.

During the mid-1990s, some critics and curators found John Drawbridge’s recent watercolours and oils almost too beautiful for their own good. When I look at those works now, all I see is the necessity therein—the highest of artistic goals and a patient, considered attempt to realise his objectives. The canvases manifest both an expansion of the mind’s eye and also a great compression. With its horizon/threshold and its gate-like pillars, Pacific imparts a sense of the artist in his accustomed land/ seascape—the artist’s mind, eye and body in their beloved environment.

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37w Ralph Hotere Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro acrylic and gold leaf on glass signed Hotere and dated ‘96 in brushpoint lower right; signed Hotere and inscribed “Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro” (The Black over the Gold), Acrylic/Gold Leaf/Oxides on Glass in brushpoint verso 1010mm x 940mm ESTIMATE $70,000 -$90,000

The title Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro belongs to a series of works that was started in 1991.

All of the paintings share the same title.

From Spanish, the title translates to Black Over the Gold, and it has been suggested that the works were strongly influenced by the Roman Catholic decorative art and architecture that Ralph Hotere saw during his time in Spain. However, while the work references Catholicism, the series as a whole is considered to be a retreat from Hotere’s politically motivated work of the 1980s.

The Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro series is typified by a refined use of common materials: gold leaf, black lacquer, glass and recycled window frames. While they contain markings that are clearly informed by the skill set that Hotere developed while working with stainless steel, they also demonstrate a sophisticated formal understanding that is reminiscent of his less-decorative work of the 1970s. In the Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro series, Hotere uses gold leaf in a manner that contrasts starkly to the way

in which he saw it used in Spanish cathedrals. Traditionally, gold leaf is used to gild or entirely cover surfaces, as if to suggest that they are made from gold. In the Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro works, he has taken individual sheets of gold leaf and used them as ready-mades. Rather than deny its presence, he has used each sheet’s square shape as a structural device. With this in mind, the series can be viewed as an attempt to break down, de-mystify and understand larger foreign structures.

Reflective surfaces have had a recurring presence in Hotere’s practice. To highlight the sparse qualities of his linear abstractions in the 1970s, Hotere embraced the use of lacquers, then in his 1980s work, he burnished and cut away from stainlesssteel surfaces. In the 1990s, his decision to work behind glass positions the Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro series as a significant departure from his previous work, in which glossy surfaces were deeply integrated into the painting process. The glass surfaces serve CHARLES NINOW

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to separate the paintings from the outside world. Furthermore, their reflective surfaces ensure that viewers are confronted not only by the painted content, but also by mirror images of themselves and their immediate physical environment. To Hotere, the relationship between the viewer and the work was integral to its overall meaning.

While these works are not protest paintings, they also were not made with purely aesthetic motivations either. In the Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro works, we see a subversive Hotere working through a set of adopted aesthetic parameters to further a dialogue about belief systems and societal controls.

Lo Negro Sobre Lo Oro pulls back the lush veneer of the Catholic Church to raise questions about its historic accumulation of wealth. Furthermore, by confronting viewers with innately personal experiences observing their own reflections, he extends the work’s mandate to question the role of organised religion in our everyday lives.

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38 Evelyn Page Still Life with Flowers oil on canvas on board signed Evelyn Page in brushpoint lower right 395mm x 325mm ESTIMATE $20,000 - $30,000

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39 Peter Stichbury Untitled acrylic on linen signed Stichbury in brushpoint; signed P. Stichbury, dated 1999 and inscribed Untitled in ink verso 600mm x 600mm ESTIMATE $20,000 - $30,000 CATALOGUE 509

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40w Paul Dibble God’s Own lost wax cast bronze 1750mm x 920mm x 600mm ESTIMATE $20,000 - $30,000

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41w John Reynolds History is This #1, #6, #7 acrylic and oil stick on canvas, triptych each signed Reynolds, dated 2000, inscribed from Gertrude Steins ‘History or Messages From History’ respectively and each inscribed History is This #1, History Is This # 6, History Is This # 7 in ink verso 1530mm x 1010mm (each) ESTIMATE $20,000 - $30,000 CATALOGUE 509

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WEBB’S

WEBB’S DEPARTMENTS Making history since 1976

Foun d e d in 1976, Webb’s est ablished a posit ion a s New Ze a la n d’s foremost auc t ion house by cre a tin g a ma rket for contem porary art at auc t ion d urin g the 198 0 s and leading t he rise of t he art ma rket in t he early 2000s.

Tod ay, We bb’s is 100% owned by NZX listed comp a ny, Mow bray C ollec t ables Lim ited. Mow bray Colle cta ble s ha s been a shareholder of Webb’s since 2 0 0 3 a n d a cquired t he cont rolling interest from the We bb’s fam ily in Oc tober, 2013.

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WEBB’S

FINE & CONTEMPORARY ART

Throughout We bb’s history, our foc us has been on the p la ce me n t of exem plary New Zealand c ult ural a s s ets a n d the cult ivat ion of a st rong secondary ma rket. With a n extensive calendar of auc t ions a n d exhibition s, Webb’s Fine & C ontem porary Art d e p a rtme n t regularly offers work by New Ze a la n d ’s most i m port ant Historic , Modern and Contemporary art ist s.

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WEBB’S FINE & CONTEMPORARY ART STAFF

C h a r l e s Ni n ow M FA S e n i o r S p e c i a l i s t , Au c t i o n e e r Charles joined Webb’s in 2011 and has an expert, wellreferenced 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.

+64 29 770 4767 +64 9 524 6804 cninow@webbs.co.nz

S i m o n B owe r b a n k MFA, BA (Hons) Senior Specialist With a varied background in commercial gallery management, curatorial work and artist’s studio management, Simon brings to Webb’s an expert knowledge of different areas of contemporary New Zealand art. He holds an honours degree in Art History and a master’s degree from Elam School of Fine Arts.

+64 21 045 1464 +64 9 524 6804 sbowerbank@webbs.co.nz

Gillie Deans S e n i o r S p e c i a l i s t ( S o u t h Is l a n d ) Gillie has over 30 years experience in New Zealand’s visual arts community and provides fine art services to Christchurch and South Island clients. Her services include: current market and insurance valuations, conservation and advice around the purchase and sale of artworks by auction or private treaty.

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+64 27 22 69 785 +64 9 524 6804 gdeans@webbs.co.nz

WEBB’S

H a n n a h D a ly BA Ju n i o r S p e c i a l i s t , Re g i s t ra r Hannah holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors 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.

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

A l e k sa n d ra Pet rov i c Pg D i p FA Ju n i o r S p e c i a l i s t , Re g i s t ra r Aleksandra has strong interest in modern and contemporary art and holds a Postgraduate Diploma of Fine Art from Elam School of Fine Arts. With experience working in commercial galleries and for private art consultants, Aleksandra brings a broad knowledge of contemporary art and design to her position at Webb’s. +64 9 524 6804 apetrovic@webbs.co.nz

Antonia Milsom BBiomedSc Ju n i o r S p e c i a l i s t Antonia joined Webb’s in 2014 having previously worked in the jewellery department of Christopher Devereaux Consulting and Dunbar Sloane. She holds a Bachelor of Biomedical Science and is currently completing her Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in Art History and French. +64 9 524 6804 amilsom@webbs.co.nz CATALOGUE 509

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WEBB’S

F I N E J E W E L L E R Y & W AT C H E S

We bb’s re p uta tion for t he consignment and sale of jewe lle ry is un ma tc hed in New Zealand. As m arket le a d e rs, our sa le s inc lude a wide selec t ion of fine a n d ma gn ifice n t jewels, loose diam onds, ant ique a n d mod e rn jewe llery and watc hes from t he m ost s ought- a fter makers in t he world.

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IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART

WEBB’S FINE JEWELLERY & WATCHES STAFF

A n n a C a r r B D e s, D i p Te a ch Specialist Anna Carr (nee Ward) is a practising jeweller who, since graduating in 2004 with a Bachelor of Design (Hons) 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.

+64 21 259 0935 +64 9 529 5606 acarr@webbs.co.nz

Pet e r D ow n ey S p e c i a l i s t & Va l u e r 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 most experienced jewellery specialists. Peter has a comprehensive knowledge of all materials and styles and his specialist areas include Castellani, Giuliano, Fabergé, Cartier, art nouveau and art deco. +64 9 529 5606

R u r i R h e e BA A ss i s ta n t & Ad m i n i s t ra to r Ruri has a strong interest in contemporary jewellery design, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and is currently working towards her Masters Degree in Arts Management. Ruri works closely with Anna Carr and Peter Downey to facilitate the operations of the Webb’s Fine Jewellery Department. +64 9 529 5606 jewelleryteam@webbs.co.nz 94

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WEBB’S

C l a i re Eve ly n Vi e w i n g A ss i s ta n t An antique and estate jewellery specialist of more than 20 years, Claire has extensive experience and broad knowledge across the retail and the secondary market.

Passionate about jewellery, she relishes the opportunity to share her love of craftsmanship and beauty with her clients.

Ka t h r y n B a rc h a m FG A , G G I A Vi e w i n g A ss i s ta n t With more than 30 years’ experience, Kathryn is an expert in gems and precious stones and one of New Zealand’s most experienced gemmologists. A current committee member of the Gemmological Association of New Zealand, Kathryn was also a founding member of the Hong Kong Gemmological Association, where she worked extensively as a valuer, prior to her return to New Zealand.

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WEBB’S

FINE & RARE WINE

We bb’s Fin e & Rare Wine depart m ent leads the New Ze a la nd auc t ion market in t he sale of fin e , colle cta ble wine. Webb’s sales feat ure fine New Ze a la n d w ines, premium Aust ralian wines, Cha mp a gn e , First Growt h Bordeaux, premium B urgun d y a n d a selec t ion of S auternes, Port s, Ita lia n wines and C ognacs.

R e e c e Wa r re n DW S Specialist Reece will be joining Webb’s in the Fine Wine department in early April with over 25 years in the industry, encompassing grape growing, sales, marketing and vineyard management. Reece’s international experience includes 3 years based in England studying and doing vintage in France. He holds a Diploma of Wine (UK Wine and Spirit Trust, England).

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+64 9 524 6804 wine@webbs.co.nz

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WEBB’S

VA LU AT I O N S & C ATA L O G U I N G

As experts in the assessment, valuation, sale and marketing of rare and historical goods, we understand the importance of our role in setting prices on the secondary market.

Webb’s provides valuation services to public institutions, regional galleries and corporate and private collections.

Domestic valuation services include single items or entire collections of artworks and the full spectrum of antiques, interiors, modern design and collectables.

B e n A s h l ey BA Senior Specialist As Webb’s valuations specialist, Ben has a sound knowledge of all collecting genres and is an expert 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. +64 9 524 6804 bashley@webbs.co.nz

Antonia Milsom BBiomedSc Ju n i o r S p e c i a l i s t Antonia joined Webb’s in 2014 having previously worked in the jewellery department of Christopher Devereaux Consulting and Dunbar Sloane. She holds a Bachelor of Biomedical Science and is currently completing her Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in Art History and French. +64 9 524 6804 amilsom@webbs.co.nz CATALOGUE 509

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WEBB’S

OCEANIC & AFRICAN ART

T he Oce a n ic & A frican Art depart m ent holds one sa le a n n ua lly in this spec ialised area of collec t ing.

The s e sa le s fe a t ure artefac t s from pre-cont ac t a n d con ta ct p e r iods t hrough to 20t h-cent ury works. Ca ta logues inc lude pieces used for rit ual, ce re mon ia l, d e corat ive and prac t ical purposes w ithin tra d ition a l Maori and Oceanic and African culture s, a s we ll a s New Zealand colonial furnit ure.

Je f f Ho b b s Specialist 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 wellrespected Sulu Gallery. Jeff has travelled internationally on behalf of Webb’s repatriating significant Maori and Oceanic material.

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

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WEBB’S

DESIGN & MARKETING

Charis Robinson BDes (Vis Com) D e s i g n D i re c to r Charis has a Bachelor of Design with honours from the University of Western Sydney and has been working in the design industry for over 15 years. With extensive design industry experience, including logo development, website development, book publishing, magazine and newspaper design, packaging design and art direction, Charis is well placed to lead Webb’s Design and Marketing department.

+64 9 524 6804 crobinson@webbs.co.nz

C a ra G r i f fi t h BVA Ju n i o r D e s i g n e r After completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts degree from The University of Auckland, Cara joined Webb’s with an enthusiasm and passion for typography, print and publication design. Cara’s previous experience includes personal design projects as well as a junior design role producing digital and print work for an Auckland-based boutique marketing agency.

+64 9 524 6804 cara@webbs.co.nz

Kev i n L a u v B D e s ( V i s C o m ) P h o to g ra p h e r Kevin holds a Bachelor of Design – Visual Communications degree, majoring in photography, from Unitec. He has a strong interest in portraiture and product photography. Kevin’s previous experience includes freelance work with projects and corporate and retail client accounts for two of New Zealand’s leading specialist retail and full-service advertising agencies.

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A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

C h r i s A l l s o p D i p A ct g , D i p I nt l M k t g G e n e ra l Ma n a g e r - Fi n a n ce a n d Hu m a n Re s o u rce s Chris Allsop comes to Webb’s with over 20 years’ experience in accounting, administration and business management. +64 21 679 319 +64 9 524 6804 callsop@webbs.co.nz

Ja m e s Hog a n G e n e ra l Ma n a g e r O p e ra t i o n s a n d Au c t i o n e e r James is one of New Zealand’s most experienced specialist valuers and appraisers. He has provided almost three decades of service to the growth and development of Webb’s as New Zealand’s leading auction house. James successfully oversees the daily operation of the gallery, and conducts as auctioneer a number of the Webb’s auctions.

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+64 21 510 477 +64 9 524 6804 jhogan@webbs.co.nz

WEBB’S

Ju l i e L a m b BA ( H o n s ) Acco u n ta n t Julie joined Webb’s in 2012 and has experience in management accounting and administration. Webb’s busy atmosphere and involvement with the passionate world of art and collectors make this her ideal role.

+64 9 524 6804 jlamb@webbs.co.nz

Ka t r i n a S ewe l l Fro n t o f Ho u s e Katrina has more than a decade of experience working at Webb’s and brings with her skills from a background in PR, social work and travel. Since working at Webb’s, she has developed a keen interest in New Zealand art and artifacts. +64 9 524 6804 ksewell@webbs.co.nz

M a n d y T h o rog o o d Fro n t o f Ho u s e Before working at Webb’s, Mandy worked as a senior personal assistant at national level for one of NZ’s largest telecommunications companies. Since starting at Webb’s nearly 3 years ago she has built a great rapport with Webb’s customers by providing help and assistance.

Mandy is always happy to go the extra mile and has a keen interest in New Zealand art and jewellery.

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DIRECTORS & MANAGEMENT

C h r i st o p h e r S wa s b ro o k Christopher is an independent director of NZXlisted 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). He is a member of the NZ Markets Disciplinary Tribunal and the NZX Listing Sub-Committee. He is also (via Elevation Capital in a personal capacity) a major sponsor of the Auckland Art Gallery’s Walters Prize.

+64 21 928 262 cswasbrook@webbs.co.nz

R i c h a rd M i l s o m Richard Milsom has been seconded to Webb’s from Elevation Capital Management Limited, a global funds management company associated with Webb’s director Christopher Swasbrook. Richard brings with him a range of experience from systems implementation to strategic planning. Richard is currently leading the strategic repositioning of Webb’s, the implementation of new internal systems to increase operational efficiency and the launching of a new website.

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+64 9 524 6804 rmilsom@webbs.co.nz

WEBB’S

Jo h n Mow b ray 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. 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.

I a n H a l st e d 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.

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Coming up on

arts.tepapa.govt.nz The online home of arts at Te Papa Art exhibitions | Art events | Online art magazine

On the Wall | Exhibitions The 2015 autumn season of Ngā Toi | Arts Te Papa opens 2 April with eight new shows and three refreshed displays. Enjoy a fresh look at modern New Zealand painting, historical portraits of Ngāti Toa, a stylish sampler of the influence of mid-century taste-maker Helen Hitchings and works by Emily Karaka and Shona Rapira Davies. Highlights include:

Tīvaevae: Out of the glory box Celebrates the art of Cook Islands quilting through Te Papa’s significant collection of tīvaevae.

Glenn Jowitt: Imaging the Pacific Honours the work of Glenn Jowitt, who spent more than 30 years photographing Pacific peoples.

Splash! Four contemporary New Zealand paintings Showcases works by Gretchen Albrecht, Andrew Barber, Fiona Connor, and Allen Maddox.

Art events & education From Easter weekend, enjoy a whole new season of art events for all ages.

Details at arts.tepapa.govt.nz/events

Off the Wall | Online art magazine Look out for issue 8 coming 30 April, featuring new New Zealand art writing and artist interviews with Gretchen Albrecht, Shona Rapira Davies, Emily Karaka, Billy Apple, and more.

Subscribe now at arts.tepapa.govt.nz/email

Unknown maker, Tīvaevae ta’ōrei pepe e pua kaute (quilt with butterfly and hibiscus pattern), (detail), circa 1940s, cloth. Te Papa (FE012444) Glenn Jowitt, Sataua, Savaiēi, Western Samoa, 1982, colour photograph from the series ‘Polynesia Here and There’. Te Papa (O.003162) Gretchen Albrecht stands in front of In a shower of gold, 2011, acrylic on canvas. Photograph by Kallan MacLeod

WEBB’S

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69 Free Carparks 43 Paid * Carparks 112 Carparks Total

217 Free Carparks 240 Paid * Carparks 457 Carparks Total

* These include parking buildings and pay and display parking.

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IMPORTANT PAINTINGS & CONTEMPORARY ART

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 as a bid than the sum nominated by the auctioneer. A bid may be withdrawn before the auctioneer declares that bidding on a lot is closed.

2. RESERVES. All lots are sold subject to the right of the seller or 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. BUYERS’ PREMIUM. The purchaser accepts that Webb’s will apply a buyer’s premium which is charged in addition to the hammer price (unless otherwise stated) together with GST on the premium, which combined sum shall be the total purchase price.

The rate of Buyers Premium is published in each catalogue online in conjunction with the catalogue. Please note that there will be a minimum Buyers’ Premium of 17.5% from 1 April 2015.

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, in clear funds, within 5 working days. Payment is by cash, bank (cashiers) cheque or Eftpos. Personal and private bank cheques will be accepted but must be cleared within 5 working days of completion of the sale. Credit cards are not accepted.

6. LOTS SOLD AS VIEWED. All lots are sold as viewed and with all errors to description faults and imperfections whether visible or not. Webb’s has used its skills and experience to ensure the genuineness or authenticity of each lot but, as it is impossible to provide conclusive proof of genuineness or authenticity for most items, buyers should 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 once payment in full has been made. If this is not done, Webb’s will not be responsible if the lot is lost stolen damaged or destroyed. Any payment by cheque will not be considered paid until the payment has cleared. 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 delivery of any lot.

9. LICENCES. Buyers who purchase an item which falls within the provisions of the Antiquities 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. 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: a. To issue proceeding against the purchaser for damages for breach of contract.

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b. To rescind the sale of that or any other lot sold to the purchaser at the same or any other auction. 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 it’s vendor. Webb’s shall be entitled to a possessory lien on any property of the purchaser for any purpose while any money remains 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 anything 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 in 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.

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.

However a bid may be withdrawn by the highest bidder at any time before the vendor accepts the bid. Once accepted by the vendor a contract has been formed.

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.

WEBB’S

INDEX OF ARTISTS ARTIST

LOT NUMBER

ARTIST

LOT NUMBER

Binney, Don

29

Mrkusich, Milan

28, 32

Clairmont, Philip

6

Page, Evelyn

38

Cotton, Shane

2, 23, 31, 35

Pule, John

5

Dibble, Paul

40

Reynolds, John

41

Drawbridge, John

36

Robinson, Peter

8, 26

Goldie, Charles Frederick

13, 22

Smither, Michael

20

Gully, John

34

Stichbury, Peter

18, 39

Hammond, Bill

10, 14, 25

Sydney, Grahame

15

Hanly, Pat

33

Upritchard, Francis

17

Hotere, Ralph

12, 21, 24, 27, 30, 37

Walsh, John

19

Maw, Liz

11

Walters, Gordon

1, 9

McLeod, Andrew

7, 16

Warhol, Andy

3, 4

Vendor is from the trade and/or a party/entity associated with a Director of Peter Webb Galleries Limited.

w

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