Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Raymond McIntyre: A Modernist View
Dynamic and progressive paintings and woodcuts from one of Aotearoa’s New Zealand foremost modernist artists.
Living Archives
Archives that tell stories about artists and history in Aotearoa
Whāia te Taniwha
Māori artists consider the enduring relevance of taniwha in Aotearoa.
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Collection
Herbert Bourne, Ford Madox Brown The Last of England
Sparked in 1852 by the actions of a friend, London artist Ford Madox Brown started on an ambitious painting on the then highly visible theme of emigration. Although modelling the couple in his painting on himself and his partner Emma Hill, its inspiration was the departure of the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner for the Australian goldfields. (Woolner would later create the memorial statue to John Robert Godley for Christchurch’s Cathedral Square.) Madox Brown’s picture of an emigrant British couple facing the unknown represented a familiar scenario at a time when vast numbers were leaving Britain for a better life – most bound for America, Canada, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand. The Last of England was completed in 1855, by which time Woolner was back in London, having been unsuccessful at mining and disillusioned by the coarse realities of colonial Sydney life. Herbert Bourne’s popular steel engraving of this painting was first published in The Art Journal in London in 1870.
(He Waka Eke Noa, 18 February 2017 – 18 February 2018)
Collection
Marti Friedlander Margaret Mahy
Many children who grew up in Ōtautahi Christchurch during the 1970s and 80s remember attending one of Margaret Mahy’s storytime sessions at the Canterbury Public Library. This celebrated Aotearoa author and former librarian was beloved not only for her imaginative books for children and young adults, but for her captivating public persona, complete with rainbow wig. This 2008 portrait by Marti Friedlander captures an unexpected view of Mahy, turning away – perhaps befitting a writer who loved magic and the supernatural and described her approach as “tapping into the surprises lurking in the heart of everything”.
(Absence, May 2023)
