Overview
This recording was created for Te Papa’s in-gallery audio tour.
Transcript
Megan Tamati-Quennell
It’s a work that probably achieved the ideal he was striving for. It’s very resolved and very pulled back. Aesthetically, it’s an extremely beautiful work.
David Eggleton, in his essay, talked about Hotere belonging to a family of black colour painters. Those painters include artists like Goya, Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, (Kasimir) Malevich, and there are many others.
Hotere was a meticulous maker of objects. He has been described as a formalist and this particular painting, which is enamel on glass, has a reflection to it. It’s part of the work and part of him wanting to remove himself, in a way, and engage the viewer. His work is really about a reduction. It’s about a subtraction, about taking away until you’re reducing, reducing, until you get the purest, most mimimal form.