Ralph Hotere ‘Black Painting XIIB’

In 1969 Ralph Hotere was recipient of the Frances Hodgkins fellowship which was, and continues to remain, one of the most prestigious and generous of visual arts residencies in New Zealand. It was set up in 1962 in an effort to encourage the work of talented artists and to associate them with the life of Otago University. The fellowship resulted in Hotere moving to the region permanently yet it also served, critically, to expose him to the work of many of the country’s most celebrated writers, musicians, dancers and composers as well as fellow painters, print makers and sculptors. Ralph Hotere’s painterly project, his vast and varied oeuvre, has always been pluralist and his great skill in capturing the eyes, hearts and minds of all those lucky enough to come into close contact with his paintings owes much to his unique ability to engage and assimilate outside influences of those whom he admires in a manner that is always generative and never derivative.

Black Painting XIIB (1970) comes from a small body of paintings which find their genesis in the ‘concrete’ or pattern poetry of Bill Manhire and which reach their zenith in the seven panel masterpiece The Malady Panels (1971), in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū. The Frances Hodgkins Fellowship sits alongside annual fellowships in both the literary and musical arts and one of its implicit aims is to create relationships between artists working in different spheres of the arts. Manhire was a promising young poet and post[1]graduate student in his twenties in Dunedin in the late 1960s and Hotere was clearly attracted to the oblique and deliberately unresolved nature of his poetry. The Malady Poem consists solely of four words in three manifestations: ‘Malady’, ‘Melody’ and ‘My Lady’.

Hotere’s Melody paintings were painted across an immensely fertile two year period which proceeded the extensive Black Painting period of the late 60s, where the artist used brolite lacquer to produce a large body of work so rich, obsessive and reductive that it still stands on its own in New Zealand art history, and before the ‘Port Chalmers’ paintings of the early 70s and the artist’s subsequent return to geometric abstraction. Black Painting XIIB is one of those magnificent abstract paintings which reveals itself slowly over time and which like much of the artist’s work rewards sustained contemplation.

Ben Plumbly