Painting no. 7

For many years, Gordon Walters was so anxious about the potential reaction to his koru paintings that he ‘could hardly bear to show the work’. Their first significant public appearance was at Auckland’s New Vision Gallery in 1966.

At the time, Walters emphasised their compositional elements, perhaps because he was uncertain how his use of the koru – an indigenous motif – might be interpreted. ‘My work is an investigation of positive/negative relationships within a deliberately limited range of forms ... [which] have no descriptive value in themselves and are used solely to demonstrate relations.’

By the time Walters created Karakia a decade later, he more openly acknowledged his strong interest in Māori culture.