Richard Killeen Three Flyers

Three Flyers

2008 powdercoated aluminium, 10/10 signed Killeen, dated 2008 and inscribed 10/10 in ink verso

1300 × 490mm

EST $20,000 — $30,000

Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Ivan Anthony, Auckland, 2009.

Richard Killeen, The Presence of Objects, Ivan Anthony, Auckland, 2010; Richard Killeen Cutouts 1981–2008, Ivan Anthony, Auckland, 2009.

Richard Killeen is a prominent New Zealand artist known for his cut-out works that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Born in 1946 in Auckland, Killeen studied at Elam School of Fine Arts in the 1960s. Having initially worked in figurative painting, from the late 1970s he began creating his now well-known cut-outs. These were first exhibited at Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington in 1978, and they caused a sensation. Instead of being contained within a conventional picture frame, Killeen’s forms and shapes were made out of pressed and painted aluminium. Silhouettes of World War II fighter aircraft were hung alongside indigenous flora and fauna – the effect was like a giant specimen drawer from a museum display mounted on a wall. These works are among the strongest examples of early post-modernism to arise in New Zealand.

Killeen’s Three Flyers was produced in the 2000s, when he returned to the cut-out format that had proved so successful in the 1970s and 80s. The three cut-out elements share the theme of flight. The first of the three ‘flyers’ presents the viewer with the silhouette of a fighter aircraft, most likely a Japanese WWIIera Zero fighter. The second cut-out is a moth in bright red, and the third is the silhouette of a bird, possibly a native New Zealand tūī. The relationship and contrast between these symbols of flight encourages the viewer to explore their own associations.

The art of Dame Robin White (Ngāti Awa) is embedded in the national visual lexicon to such an extent that it is hard to imagine it hasn’t always been there. With their distinctively stylised presentations of rolling hills and rustic architecture, her artworks seem woven into our national identity on a primary level. Given this, it is important to keep in mind that White was a pioneering artist. She was integral to the development of the regionalist sensibilities of modern New Zealand art.

In 1967 White graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland where she was taught by Colin McCahon, whom she cites as an important early influence. In order to earn a living, she then undertook further study at the Auckland Teachers’ Training College. Porirua’s Mana College was the first school where White taught after graduating as a teacher in 1968. Her three-year tenure there was a formative period in her career that saw her construct images that relied more on their own internal logic than on a desire to recreate a particular vantage.

3 Robin White Houses and Hills, Porirua c1970s graphite on paper signed R. White, dated '70 and inscribed Houses and Hills, Porirua in graphite verso

375 × 340mm

EST $10,000 — $16,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection, Wellington.

White's quintessentially stylised drawing Houses and Hills, Porirua is a fine example of her ability to render fundamental form and structure with great economy. Here she has rendered a housing development nestled amongst Porirua’s rippling hills. Porirua was originally planned as a satellite city of Wellington in the 1940s, which was to consist mainly of state housing. However, industrial development in the region led to an accelerated growth in population. The houses in White’s image are architecturally simple and plain, suggesting they were built in a hurry to accommodate urgent need.

This work reveals the foundations of White’s new image-making strategies, which positioned her, along with Don Binney, at the forefront of a second wave of New Zealand modern painting that emerged in the 1970s and sought to update the themes propagated by New Zealand regionalist painting in the 1930s.

Robin White once stated, “What I paint depends on where I am.”1 This statement, in an article that she wrote for an early issue of Art New Zealand, is perhaps the most conclusive and wellrounded summation of her practice to ever be published. While her artworks function as a distilled commentary about New Zealand’s civic and social climate at the time in which they were made, the focus of her practice has always been centred in her immediate environment: the places and people that she understood best. White’s landscape works of the 1970s often conform to a set of conventions she developed. Generally, these works present hinterland nestled between the foreshore and mountainous terrain. These images carry with them an implicit criticism of modern New Zealand’s taming of the landscape through ongoing urban sprawl.

4 Julian Dashper

Halley's Comet at Silverdale

1985 oil on canvas signed JULIAN DASHPER, dated 1985 and inscribed

HALLEY'S COMET

AT SILVERDALE in graphite verso

365 × 745mm

EST $8,000 — $12,000

PROVENANCE

Dashper Family Collection, Warkworth; Gifted by the artist, 1986.

Julian Dashper was a vanguard artist of the 1980s, 90s and 2000s who, along with others such as Billy Apple, caught the attention of a discerning international art world with a voracious appetite for undiscovered talent; curators and art dealers in search of the next new wave of contemporary avant-garde. Even so, like many of our luminaries who earn international acclaim, he is yet to have his deserved significance acknowledged nationally. That being said, Dashper’s reputation amongst New Zealand's art community is legendary.

Robert Leonard, art writer and curator, stated in an article he wrote for Art and Australia (2009) that Dashper “made New Zealand art history seem rich and pertinent, but also available for revision and mistreatment. Offering himself as an unfolding case study of a provincial artist wanting to make his mark locally and offshore, Dashper was one of a kind.”1

Dashper was one of a kind — he was a multidisciplinary artist with a razor-sharp wit. To use music as a metaphor, the artist was not just a one-man band — he not only played every instrument but he invented his own. He was an artist who resisted definition. The case in point is Halley's Comet at Silverdale (1985), featured in this catalogue. At face value we see an abstract painting 365 x 745mm; however, what is also at play is Dashper the conceptual artist. Though ‘conventional’ is not an adjective for describing Dashper’s work, it could be said that Halley's Comet at Silverdale is one of his more conventional works.

To return to the musician as metaphor, let us consider, for the sake of context, Halley’s Comet at Silverdale as the B-side to another, larger, work titled Cass (1986). In Dashper’s Cass we see him riff on his own work, while he also riffs on what is an iconic image (the railway settlement of Cass) within New Zealand art history: Rita Angus’s Cass (1936), one of her most known paintings. André Hemer is another artist who has referred to Angus’s Cass; his CASS (2012) speaks to ideas of distance and travel, ostensibly as do Dashper’s and Angus’s.