Art for Life's Sake
On Friday after attending our daughter’s graduation in Auckland
we went to the Gordon Walters: New Vision exhibition
at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. This has been put on as a partnership
project between the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o
Tāmaki with support from the Walters Estate.
For those who don’t know who Gordon Walters is, this is the
official blurb from the website[i]
“Gordon Walters is one of New Zealand’s most influential
modern artists. Across six decades he explored the potential of a few simple
geometric elements with a singular focus, creating works of exactitude and
refinement.
Gordon Walters: New Vision is the first comprehensive survey
of the artist’s complete body of work and draws on paintings from major public
and private collections across New Zealand. The exhibition provides an in-depth
look into the history of Walters’ development, and reveals the different art
forms which fuelled his vision and inspired the creation of his own unique
visual language. The original black and white koru paintings of the 1960s are
brought back together for the first time and are shown alongside
never-before-seen paintings, studies and notebooks.”
The thing he is most famous for is the use of the koru
pattern. It reappears in a number of his works and is probably the form he is
most.
One of the paintings that spoke to me was Maho. On the Te Papa website this paintings
described as
“In te reo Māori,
maho means quiet, undisturbed. Although Gordon Walters seldom used Māori titles
for their literal meaning — they were a way of acknowledging the Maori
tradition that informed his work and of identifying individual paintings more
elegantly than with the conventional modernist epithet, ‘Untitled’ — in this
case it is remarkably apt. As Margaret Orbell, the artist’s wife and a leading
scholar of Maori poetry and song, wrote, ‘It is a poetic word, which can be
used in a mystical sense. Here it conveys something of the stillness and calm
which this painting communicates.’[ii]
I love how the two koru
become one and yet somehow retain the original two shapes. As I looked at it it
spoke of how people come together. For example, a married couple come together
and become one, and yet they retain who they are. Their individuality
contributes to how the whole is created.
The other one that spoke to me was very similar - Untitled Koru, painted in 1995, I
thinks shortly before his death. It is very similar to Maho yet seems to me to have an honesty about this. Two do not go
together easily very often. There is struggle, at times conflict. We can see this in Aotearoa where the two
peoples who originally signed the Treaty still struggle to work out what it
means to be one people. If you listen to people like Don Brash and his Hobsons
Choice group, to be one is to be all the same, that is all English speaking and
immersed in Pakeha culture. But Untitled Koru for
me speaks about each
partner holding their integrity, and together making a new “one people which
honours both cultures and ways of being in the world.
This is a great exhibition. To read about what is involved in the composition
of each work is astounding. To see the development of that work, and where it
went was inspiring. Take the time.
There is an article on Stuff about Maho and more. It can be found here
[i]
https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/exhibition/gordon-walters-new-vision
[ii] https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/656749
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