Leo Bensemann Evening, Ligar Bay 1979. Oil on board. Collection of Burnside High School. Reproduced with permission
Leo Bensemann Rain in the Paradise Garden, Takaka 1979. Oil on hardboard. Collection Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased with assistance from a group of Canterbury artists, 1991
14 September 2024 – 9 February 2025
A collection of Leo Bensemann’s extraordinary Mohua Golden Bay landscape paintings.
Leo Bensemann felt a strong connection to Mohua at the top of Te Waipounamu the South Island throughout his life. Although he lived and worked for most of his life in Ōtautahi Christchurch he was born and raised in this idyllic landscape, and he was at his happiest painting, walking, swimming, reading and socialising at Mohua. Over the last two decades of his life he produced an extraordinary series of paintings based on the hills, beaches and intriguing karst rock formations that dominate the Bay. Exquisitely executed, these paintings are imbued with a sense of the region’s unique landscape and convey something of the profound impact it had on Bensemann in his later years. Paradise Garden focuses on this important body of work by one of Canterbury’s most talented painters.
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Location:
Ravenscar Gallery -
Curator:
Peter Vangioni -
Exhibition number:
1171
Collection works in this exhibition
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Director's Foreword
Director’s Foreword
As I write this it’s a cold and gloomy Ōtautahi Christchurch day and the Gallery is abuzz with a wide range of visitors, family groups and children, taking part in our school holiday workshops and programmes, and filling our spaces with activity, excitement and laughter. It’s a lovely warm place to be on a grey day. Hopefully by the time this Bulletin arrives in your hand there’s a sense that spring is arriving, trees are greening up and the days are longer once again. By then we will have recently opened our major new collection focused exhibition to replace Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection.
Commentary
The tide is in and the sea is like a blue mirror
I’ve always thought that if you’re a landscape artist, the working holiday must be the perfect getaway. You get to immerse yourself in an environment that may then become reflected in your art, a manifestation of your response and connection to a place. This was certainly the case for several Ōtautahi Christchurch landscape painters in the twentieth century: Doris Lusk and Onekakā, Bill Sutton and the Port Hills, Ivy Fife and the Canterbury High Country, Rita Angus and Wainui. For their close contemporary and friend Leo Bensemann it was Mohua Golden Bay, a landscape that had a profound effect on him when he holidayed there in the summer of 1965. It was a location he bonded with so much that he returned regularly to holiday and paint most summers for the rest of his life, in the process creating a remarkable body of over sixty paintings of the region.
My Favourite
Leo Bensemann: Seascape with causeway
The four years I spent at Elam as an undergrad straight out of high school ruined art for me. I entered the building on Mount Street in love with painting and wanting to be a painter, and I left in love with nothing.
Article
Tomorrow, Book, Caxton Press, Landfall
In the decades before and after the Second World War, Christchurch experienced a remarkable artistic efflorescence that encompassed the visual arts, literature, music, theatre and the publishing of books and journals. And the phenomenon was noticed beyond these islands. For instance, in his 1955 autobiography, English publisher and editor of Penguin New Writing and London Magazine, John Lehmann, wrote (with a measure of exaggeration, perhaps) that of all the world’s cities only Christchurch at that time acted ‘as a focus of creative literature of more than local significance’.
Interview
Talking Bensemann
Leo Bensemann was one of the most respected figures in the Christchurch arts scene, and played a pivotal role in influential arts collective The Group. Always something of an odd-man-out, he produced a large body of work across several different disciplines before his death in 1986. In an attempt to get a fuller picture of the man himself, Gallery director Jenny Harper spoke to two artists who knew him well, John Coley and Quentin MacFarlane.
Artist Profile
Leo Bensemann: an art venture
Leo Bensemann (1912–1986) was a pivotal figure bridging the worlds of literature and visual arts – a go-between like no other. Peter Simpson is an authority on this distinctive artist.