Relief C

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Receiving the Association of New Zealand Art Societies Fellowship Award in 1960 was incredibly significant for Don Peebles. It enabled him to travel to London, where he studied and worked, unhindered by financial constraints. He commented: ‘One of the good things that happened to me when I got to London, was the realisation that I was there to learn … experiment.’1 His chance discovery shortly after his arrival of an article on abstract art by Victor Pasmore, and also seeing this artist’s work first hand, had a profound effect on Peebles. As he bluntly stated,
it was ‘like a kick in the guts’.2

Pasmore argued that for abstract artists to develop their art fully they ‘must move from the two-dimensional medium of painting to the three-dimensional world of sculpture’.3 Peebles wholeheartedly embraced this idea, constructing reliefs that projected out from the wall in three dimensions — and even four dimensions when the works cast shadows over time.

Back in New Zealand in late 1962, Peebles’ relief constructions became increasingly refined and austere as the decade progressed. By the early 1970s works such as Relief C highlight just how resolved they had become. A flat rectangular field of blue painted on the left of a sheet of otherwise exposed plywood forms the backdrop. From this surface a carefully considered angular wooden construction protrudes towards the viewer.

By the mid-1970s, just over a decade since his first construction reliefs, Peebles acknowledged that he had ‘refined the guts out of the idea’. His works had become increasingly distilled and he now felt the need to progress in a more expressive and painterly direction. Although he accordingly moved on from his construction reliefs, they remain a remarkably fastidious, enigmatic chapter in New Zealand art of the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Construction’, Peebles said, ‘is not a style but simply a method … [they] are assembled with a free sense of order.’4

Peter Vangioni

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Don Peebles described his encounter with British abstract art in the early 1960s as ‘a kick in the guts’. Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore were both creating abstract constructions that convinced him to ‘keep on pushing the boundaries’ of what painting could achieve.

Peebles experimented with making three-dimensional reliefs in wood, transforming the surface of his work into something that projected into space. He left detailed notes on how to light his reliefs. For him, the shadows cast were as integral to the work as its material elements.