B.
Alexis Hunter
Behind the scenes
What is important is that artists lend their voice to expressions of freedom in their own unique way. Sometimes an artist's complex reading of a situation, which then can be put in a simple pure image, can help a movement become more popular. Art is an expressive medium, and if it is used to portray the values of a retrogressive regime, the art will be stilted and lifeless. That is why fascistic regimes always kill the poets and writers, and ban contemporary artists from showing. Just by the making of it, real art becomes the voice of freedom.
Alexis Hunter We Do This 1988. Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1992
That was New Zealand-born, UK-based artist Alexis Hunter speaking in an interview with Marie-Émilie Fourneaux for Luxe Immo magazine in 2010. Hunter, who died in Camden, London on February 24, was a fearless and well-respected artist who became an active member of the Radical Feminism movement in Britain. Her works were included in the first female-curated Hayward Annual Exhibition in 1978 and she was selected to represent Britain at the 1982 Sydney Biennale. A resurgence of interest in the work of that time has seen her included in several significant exhibitions in recent years, including 'WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which later toured to New York and Vancouver. She maintained strong links with New Zealand and returned regularly to lecture and exhibit here. The Gallery holds four works by Hunter - We Do This (1988), a painting of confiscated leopard and tiger skins piled up for burning, and three lithographs from a series celebrating local kai moana that was printed by Christchurch printmaker Marian Maguire in 1990.
Alexis Hunter Les moules d'Aotearoa III 1990. Lithograph. Purchased 1991
Alexis Hunter Les moules d'Aotearoa I 1990. Lithograph. Purchased 1991
Alexis Hunter Grondin à Otautahi 1990. Lithograph. Purchased 1991
Related
Collection
Alexis Hunter Grondin à Otautahi
For the exhibition Painters As Printmakers (19 October 2007 - 20 January 2008) this work appeared with this label:
Grondin à Otautahi (Gurnard at Christchurch) is from a series of lithographs by Alexis Hunter that celebrate kai moana. The expressive, spontaneous approach found in Hunter’s paintings has been beautifully translated in this work, with the artist appearing to revel in the freely applied brush work used in the gurnard and the loosely applied tusche washes which form a lively background. The collaboration between Hunter and Christchurch printmaker Marian Maguire has enabled the artist to fully explore and develop the painterly qualities inherent in the lithographic process.
Hunter graduated in painting from the Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University in 1970. Having moved to London in 1972 she became a leading figure of the neo-expressionist movement during the 1980s and gained a considerable international profile.
Collection
Alexis Hunter We Do This
“I want to reach an audience that has been ignored in the past”, said Alexis Hunter in 1980. “The women who have to bear the burden of change in our society and the guilt and fear that induces.”Born in Auckland, Alexis Hunter moved to London in 1972. Her early work challenged the construction of femininity in Western culture: critics detected in it a “thread of rage”, which extended into her later environmentally concerned paintings such as We Do This. “The inspiration for this work was a newspaper photograph of hundreds of tiger and leopard skins piled up to be burnt – confiscated from poachers”, she stated.As a painter, photographer and conceptual artist, Hunter made a significant contribution to the international history of feminist art. “We were … working specifically about women, and for women and intelligent men”, she commented later, adding that one of the main problems with being a female artist was “earning enough money to keep on working”. “In New Zealand they do tend to see me as more well-rounded because the concept of being a feminist is not radical there”, she observed in 1998.
(We do this, 12 May 2018 - 26 May 2019)