Taut Focus

BRIDIE LONIE

The koru works of Gordon Walters were first exhibited in 1966 at New Vision Gallery in Auckland. For many, these remain his signature pieces. Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s extensive Gordon Walters: New Vision counters this view, placing the artist firmly within mid-century modernist transatlantic abstraction while remaining even-handedly attentive to the complementary factors of his position in a bicultural Pacific nation. Curated by Lucy Hammonds, Julia Waite and Laurence Simmons, the exhibition and its accompanying book were produced in conjunction with Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki and draw on the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Loan Collection of the Gordon Walters Estate. Both present a retrospective of Walters’ work as well as an intellectual history of the implications of abstraction’s insistence on the separation between art and life.

The exhibition’s richness lies in the ways it plays out the histories of the past century. Walters started painting in the 1930s when Western artists saw art as autonomous, apolitical and universal. During his later years, postcolonial thought made it clear that in the search for non-representational forms artists had appropriated art forms that were vital to colonised peoples’ identities. The references that abstraction both repressed and transformed had to be acknowledged. In the book, Deidre Brown’s essay, ‘Pitau, Primitivism and Provocation: Gordon Walters’ Appropriation of Maori Iconography’, describes his engagement with through Rangihiroa Panoho’s response in 1990, to the recommendations of the Waitangi Tribunal to the Crown for the Wai 262 Indigenous Flora and Fauna and Cultural Property Intellectual Property Claim with regard to such uses.