Hotere paintings: surrey exhibition

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33541, 23 May 1974, Page 10

Hotere paintings: surrey exhibition

A survey exhibition of paintings by Ralph Hotere at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery was organised by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery with the support of the Queen Elizabeth 11 Arts Council. Born at Mitiiniti in 1931, Ralph Hotere attended St Peter’s College, Auckland, and Auckland Teachers’ College and specialised in art at King Edward Technical College, Dunedin. After working for some years as a school art adviser he received a New Zealand Art Societies Fellowship to travel to Britain in 1961. where he studied painting and graphic design at the Central School of Art, London. He returned to Auckland in 1965 and rejoined the Education Department as an art adviser until 1969 when he was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship by the University of Otago. Unlike other recipients of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship Hotere elected to stay in Dunedin, where he has continued to work as a painter. The period of his painting surveyed by the exhibition is from 1962-3 to 1973, with the earliest works having been painted during his visit to Europe. His themes at that stage were ones that then held world-wide interest — such as the Cuban missile crisis, Algerian independence, and the human rights movement. but by far the biggest selection of work produced in Europe belongs to the “Sangro series” begun after the artist visited the war

cemetery near the Sangro River, a place with personal ■ associations for him. The “Sangro ’ paintings are a mixture of anguish and outrage realised in the symbolic form of the cross, the blackness of death, the red ot blood, the ominous repetition of numbers in the low twenties. and the cry of Sangro Repeated over and over again. The “Zero series.” painted after his return to New Zealand. are part of a constructivist search for a pure aesthetic statement in which he combines acrylic paint overlaid with plastic strip into brightly-coloured and joyful compositions. “BLACK PAINTINGS” Thirteen examples of the “Black paintings” painted during 1968-69 are included iin the exhibition. In these.

the “Malady series. ’’ and the < Port Chalmers” (1972)' paintings Ralph Hotere ( achieved an uncompromising minimal art form that is linear and austere in the indiv duai elements used, hut rich in the immaculate surfaces and subtle variations that occur between one tone of black and another and in the light variations that occur in those works painted in brolite lacquer. The “Malady series” rein troduces stenciled words to | his work in a reflective, ) almost religious way. and the I 1973 “Requiem” paintings <. also relate back —in this case J to the first “Black paintings.” \ The lines are closer together [ and somehow more fluid and the total effect, while being i in ho way less minimal, is t evidence of tiie continuing |

development occunng tn h « work. The exhibition will rema open until Mat 26. —G I M.