Robert Ellis: Wai Manawa

from Robert Ellis: Wai Manawa, 20.04.23 – 27.05.23

by Webb's Auction House

20.04.23 — 27.05.23

Monday to Friday | 10am — 5pm Saturday | 11am — 3pm

Mark Hutchins-Pond Specialist, Art mark@webbs.co.nz

+64 4 555 6011

Karen Rigby

Business Manager karen@webbs.co.nz

+64 4 555 6011

23 Marion Street

Te Aro

Wellington 6011 webbs.co.nz signed Robert Ellis and dated ‘62 in ink lower right

Over the course of seven decades of artistic practice, Robert Ellis produced a distinctive and historically significant body of work. Robert Ellis: Wai Manawa brings together a remarkable selection of never before exhibited works on paper. This exhibition has been sourced from Ellis’s estate, and it features a stunning range of artworks that showcase the skill and vision of one of Aotearoa’s preeminent artists. Ellis was a master draftsman, and these exceptionally crafted drawings and paintings demonstrate his sophisticated technical abilities and artistic sensibility. Ellis was born in England in 1929. He trained at the Northampton School of Art from 1944 - 1947, and the Royal College of Art in London from 1949 – 1953, gaining a rich depth of knowledge that was to inform his lifelong pursuit of painting. In the two years between, he completed National Service with the photographic unit of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command – an experience that likely informed the aerial views evident in his later work.

Ellis migrated to New Zealand in the 1950s and took up a lecturing role at Elam School of Fine Arts. He chose to live in Birkenhead on Auckland’s North Shore because of its close proximity to the rapidly developing motorway and city harbour bridge project. This became part of his daily experience and shaped his most distinctive painting motif. The area that the artist called home is known in te reo as Wai Manawa – which translates to ‘the source of the water’. The title of the exhibition is both an acknowledgement of the area Ellis called home, and a poetic inference to works on paper as the source of the artist’s creative production.

Ellis is a major national figure in modernist painting. His work is held in the highest esteem by private and institutional collectors alike. Robert Ellis: Wai Manawa shows another aspect of his storied artistic oeuvre.

330 × 430mm

Price $5,000 signed Robert Ellis and dated ‘68 in brushpoint lower left 500 × 305mm