This muted, ash-toned, pared-back sculptural landscape by Ōtautahi Christchurch-born Bill Sutton is both homage to a long tradition and to a location he knew well. Sutton had started to paint around Te Pātaka-o-Rākaihautū / Banks Peninsula and its buckling, eroded edges on returning from a two-year stay in Britain and Europe, which had enabled him to see his own place with different eyes. Taking here a modernist approach that drew much from art history, Sutton joined a long line of artists to represent the four seasons. Sandro Botticelli painted Primavera, his allegorical depiction of spring, in about 1482, while Pieter Brueghel the Elder was the first to begin painting the four seasons in series in the 1560s. Sutton exhibited Autumn and Winter, the first two completed works in this series, at the Christchurch Group show in 1968, and the remaining two in a touring solo show in 1970.

(As Time Unfolds, 5 December 2020 – 7 March 2021)