Untitled

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

In the early 1960s Ralph Hotere spent several years in the United Kingdom and Europe on an education and research fellowship, studying at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and travelling in France and Italy. This period had a big impact on him. The print Untitled, made shortly after his return to Aotearoa New Zealand, represents a threshold phase for his paintings, drawings and prints. Hotere processed American abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism in a new abstract language. Around 1965–66, he began assembling dozens of combinations of squares, circles and truncated curvilinear bands, similar in feel to Untitled, in screenprint, lithography and acrylics. Hotere’s visual shorthand involved reduced colours: a single black; a blue or two; or at most three colours, sometimes with red as a highlight.

Untitled is out of sync with Hotere’s later hard-edge, content-expunged, Ad Reinhardt-like minimalism, as seen in his ‘Black painting’ series of 1968–69. Here there is still a playful, lyrical, anthropomorphic feel to the treatment of shapes. Organic rectangles and hand-cut, stencilled circles — stacked Brâncuși-like — along with the two curved forms on the right, read almost like the truncated limbs, head and torso of a human body. Other concurrent works invite the viewer to read narratives through colour and titles evoking war, revolution and romance: Red square and American khaki, for example.

On his return Hotere progressively moved away— to Dunedin for a residency in 1969 and later to nearby Port Chalmers — from his Te Aupōuri tribal roots in the far north. Drawing any firm conclusions from the distance Hotere chose to go from the north would be as misleading as claiming that ethnic markers are absent in works like Untitled. It is difficult to clarify the intangible role that wairua (spirit) has here. However, even in this 1965 work we may note the interchange of negative and positive patterning that is readily relatable to the art of kōwhaiwhai and to raranga, or weaving. The lifelong sensibility the artist was honing involved, as in the Māori aesthetic, a focus not simply on positive shapes but also on the negative spaces around them.

Rangihīroa Panoho