Gallery partnership blooms with Chrysanthemum

An early artwork by acclaimed New Zealand artist Gordon Walters has been added to Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū’s collection.

The artwork, Chrysanthemum, has been jointly purchased by Christchurch Art Gallery and Dunedin Public Art Gallery and will be shared between the two institutions.

Gordon Walters, Chrysanthemum, 1944, oil on cardboard. Collections of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū and Dunedin Public Art Gallery (with funding from the Bateman Bequest); jointly purchased 2018. Courtesy of the Gordon Walters Estate.

It is the second time the two South Island galleries have jointly purchased an artwork. The first joint purchase was Shane Cotton’s The Haymaker Series I–V in 2015.

“Chrysanthemum is an important work of 20th-century New Zealand art, an essential reference point in the development of abstraction in this part of the world—painted by an artist based in Christchurch for the latter part of his life. We are delighted to acquire this major painting in partnership with our colleagues in Dunedin,” says Christchurch Art Gallery director Blair Jackson.

Chrysanthemum goes on display tonight at Christchurch Art Gallery as part of the Gordon Walters: New Vision touring exhibition—a partnership project between Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience the full spectrum of Walters’ sophisticated abstraction. It includes more than 130 artworks: from the early surrealist drawings of the mid-1940s and colourful gouache paintings of the 1950s, through to the visually complex koru series of the 1970s, and the later, refined geometric works.

Gordon Walters: New Vision begins with the surviving paintings first seen in Walters’ milestone 1966 exhibition at Auckland’s New Vision Gallery, when Walters chose—after many years of working in isolation—to make his abstract artworks public.

With unprecedented access to the private archives of the Walters Estate, this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s complete body of work, including preparatory sketches and notebooks.

The exhibition is free. It opens at Christchurch Art Gallery tomorrow and closes 17 March 2019.