For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:

“No object, and certainly no painting, is seen in the same way by everyone, yet most people want an unmistakeable meaning which is accessible to all in a work of art. It is the spectator which provides the change and meaning in these works.”

—Ralph Hotere, 1973

A poem by Bill Manhire was the inspiration for this series of paintings. It repeated the words ‘malady’, ‘melody’ and ‘my lady’ and the repetition, simplicity and strong emotion of the poem appealed to Ralph Hotere. ‘Melody’ and ‘malady’ come together in ‘my lady’, suggesting that deep-felt love can be both a sickness and a delight.

The fine circles in the paintings suggest the fragility of love, and their intense colour celebrates its beauty. Hotere made several works based on this poem during the early 1970s.

Hotere was born in Taikarawa, Northland, and was widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s greatest living artists. He is represented in public and private collections throughout New Zealand. He lived at Port Chalmers near Dunedin.

1969 was a watershed year for Ralph Hotere. It was the year he was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago, which led to his permanent move to Dunedin and Port Chalmers. Black Painting is not only one of the first purely abstract paintings to enter the collection, it is also the first painting by a Māori artist to be acquired. In Hotere’s enigmatic series of Black Paintings from 1968 and 1969, pinstripe circles or lines pierce the void of the dark backgrounds. Black Painting was acquired from the 1969 Group Show in Christchurch by Muir, who had studied under Hotere in Auckland during the mid-1960s.

(1969 Comeback Special 27 August – 6 November 2016)

This photograph of Dunedin artist Ralph Hotere is part of a series of portraits of New Zealand artists by Marti Friedlander, taken between 1977 and 1979. She was inspired to photograph living artists after reading Alexander Liberman’s book The Artist in his Studio. Here the key elements of hand and easel anchor the image as Hotere looks away from the camera. He is relaxed and contemplative, yet his penetrating self-awareness is framed by the intense light falling on his face and hair. Friedlander was born in London, she studied photography at Bloomsbury Technical School and worked as a studio assistant for portrait photographer Douglas Glass and fashion photographer Gordon Crocker. She arrived in Auckland with her New Zealand husband Gerrard in 1958. Friedlander’s first photographs in New Zealand were of a protest meeting in 1960 but it was not until 1964, after returning from a year in Israel and Europe, that she began taking photographs full-time. She was awarded a Companion of New Zealand Order of Merit in 1999.