Exhibitions
Events
On display
Gordon Walters: New Vision
Gordon Walters Green and pink 1967. Gouache on paper. Dunedin Public Art Gallery Loan Collection. Courtesy of the Gordon Walters Estate
Talk
Past event
Meet at the front desk
free
Join curator Nathan Pohio for an engaging tour discussing the work of one of New Zealand’s most important modernist artists and the differences in the Christchurch iteration of this landmark exhibition.
Related reading: Talk
Exhibition
Gordon Walters: New Vision
17 March 2019
Remembered especially for his Koru or Pītau series, Gordon Walters’s explorations into modernist abstract painting are invested with a distinctly South Pacific energy.
Collection
Gordon Walters Black on white
Gordon Walters is best-known for work that fused the influence of European modernist art and Māori and Pacific art forms, particularly the koru motif of painted kōwhaiwhai rafter designs. Walters’ influences from European modernism included the hard-edged geometric abstractions of Victor Vasarely and Auguste Herbin, seen while in Europe in 1950–51. Walters made his first optically charged ‘koru paintings’ in 1956, but didn’t show them until 1966 when he first exhibited this painting in Auckland.
Walters’ adaptation of the koru has been both admired and criticised by cultural commentators. Walters himself, when discussing the motif, increasingly focused on the fine mechanics of abstraction:
'What I’ve done to the form is push it more in the direction of geometry. So that I can have in my painting not only a positive/negative effect of black and white, but I can also have a working of vertical and horizontal, which is equally important.' (Op + Pop, 6 February – 19 June 2016)