Maori Hodgkins Fellow

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31828, 5 November 1968, Page 10

Maori Hodgkins Fellow

The Auckland artist, Ralph Hotere, has been given New Zealand’s major art award, the 1969 Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at Otago University. Mr Hotere is an abstract painter working in the socalled “international” style. He is the first Maori Hodgkins fellow.

He was born at Hokianga in 1931 and studied in Europe and Britain on a New Zealand Art Fellowship from 1961 to 1965, including two years in France and Italy in a Karolyi International Fellowship in 1962-63.

He exhibited in England, having one-man shows in the Whitechapel and Redfern Galleries.

Since his return to New Zealand he has had several one-man shows in the Barry

Lett Galleries and has exhibited in Sydney, Dunedin and in exhibitions of contemporary New Zealand painting and graphics. Mr Hotere has been working as an art and craft adviser with the Education Department, Newmarket. Next year he will paint in Dunedin on a lecturer’s salary ($3200) with accommodation and a studio supplied by the university. Mr Hotere, who is 38,

trained as an art student under Gordon Tovey at the Dunedin Teachers’ College, and his first exhibition was held in Dunedin.

During his tenure of the fellowship, Mr Hotere plans to extend a series of paintings which he began in 1965 after his return from Europe. He also wishes to explore the possibility of the fusion of pigments on to glass by heat for inexpensive stainedglass decoration.