This exhibition of works on paper drawn from New Zealand’s leading proponents of this medium presents a rich variety.
Stanley Palmer’s bamboo engravings of the West Coast of New Zealand have attained iconographic status. Pat Hanly’s Untitled 1995 is dead centre to this important artist’s concerns of expressive colour and the depictions of emotion, joy and celebration of life.
Alexis Neal uses the language of cultural form to portray the significance of object, Para Matchitt establishes the positive and negative of line and space to ground the humanism and carving references of these large scale ink drawings (from the acclaimed Te Pakanga Series which toured nationwide).
Jeffrey Harris’s mastery of lithography and the human form is acknowledged widely and the remarkable Survey Exhibition emphasises still further the fundamental symbiotic importance of drawing to his painting. Ralph Hotere’s nudes are sensuous, beautiful and restrained.
Marilyn Webb’s large-scale evocations of land and sky exist as rhythmic poems while Nigel Brown and Philippa Blair utilise the narrative devices of storytelling so characteristic in their work.