Michael Hight is a rare artist in that he demonstrates an equally remarkable facility with representational works and geometric abstraction.

By any criteria Hight is an outstanding artist in these two significantly different art languages. In these opposing and yet, in his case, related and concurrent practises, there is a unity of purpose and vision. There is a dialogue “between familiarity and unfamiliarity, between sameness and difference.” (1) His work is not only ‘of’’ but ‘about’. He is to the forefront of a group “of artists who commentate, illuminate and celebrate.” (2)

Indeed, while the location and specification of place has always been fundamental to his work, the direction of his journey has been the reverse of the usual: it moves from abstraction to representational as the emergence of the beehive as his predominant subject (and metaphor) demonstrates.

1. Paula Green, “Walking the World,” Art New Zealand, No. 77, Summer 1995-96.
2. T J McNamara, “Abstracts that Comment on Life,” New Zealand Herald, July 22, 2002.