B.

Op + Pop 6 February – 19 June 2016

The New Plymouth-based Don Driver worked from the mid-1970s until the 1990s on sculptural assemblages made from found materials. Echoing the work of American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose work Driver had experienced while visiting New York in 1965, Energy Triad makes assertive use of familiar, locally sourced items, placing pioneering farming tools alongside advertising and road signage, all with a meticulous eye to formal balance and arrangement.

For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label: “I try to create tensions between colours, shapes, shadows and reflections to create simplicity and ambiguity. […] I don’t like my painting to be evocative but to be something to be looked at for itself. It is a combination of flat surfaces and colours just nestling against each other.”

—Don Driver, 1979

The style of Drum Process is known as ‘assemblage’. This is a technique in which an artwork is assembled from found (pre-existing) objects, rather than being directly created through mark-making or carving. The ‘subject’ of the work is the arrangement and juxtaposition of colour, texture and shape. Assemblage first began in the early 20th century with such artists as Georges Braque (1882 -1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881 -1973). However, Don Driver’s work relates most strongly to the work of American artists such as Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) and Jasper Johns (b.1930). Drum Process is a strong example of his distinctive brand of formal Abstraction, constructed from the everyday materials of popular New Zealand culture. Driver didn’t receive formal training in art but took night classes in woodwork, welding, drawing and pottery. He first began working as a sculptor in a Primitivist style and also exhibited paintings. It was in the early 1960s that he began to develop the assemblage style for which he is best known.