Artist of the day

Monday, July 20, 2026

Artist of the Day, July 20, 2026 : Gordon Walter, a New Zealander painter, graphic artist (2583)

Gordon Frederick Walters (1919 – 1995) was an artist and graphic designer who is significant to New Zealand culture due to his representation of New Zealand in his Modern Abstract artworks.

Gordon Walters was born and raised in Wellington, where he went to Miramar South School and Rongotai College. From 1935 to 1939 he studied as a commercial artist at Wellington Technical College under Frederick V. Ellis.

Walters applied to join the army during World War II but was turned down due to medical problems. He took up a job in the Ministry of Supply doing illustrations. Walters traveled to Australia in 1946 and then visited photographer and painter Theo Schoon in South Canterbury, who was photographing Māori rock art at Ōpihi River. This visit was central to Walters work as he began using Māori cultural themes in his painting. In 1950 Walters moved to Europe where he became influenced by Piet Mondrian, Victor Vasarely and Auguste Herbin. On his return to New Zealand in 1953, Walters began to fuse abstract modernism with traditional Māori art.

In the early fifties Walters' designs progressed and New Zealand shapes and ideas, in particular the Māori koru form, became important themes. His design straightened the stem of the koru in a way not seen in customary Māori contexts. Walters stated "My work is an investigation of positive/ negative relationships within a deliberately limited range of forms; the forms I use have no descriptive value in themselves and are used solely to demonstrate relations. I believe that dynamic relations are most clearly expressed by the repetition of a few simple elements."

In 1956 Walters made the initial studies for the painting that would become his first koru painting. In 1964 Walters made the first large scale (1220 x 915mm) koru painting that has survived. It was titled after the Māori spiritual leader Te Whiti-o-Rongomai (Te Āti Awa) and may also reference Te Whiti Street in Kilbirnie Wellington where Walters lived as a child.

The Walters Estate was established by the artist's wife Margaret Orbell to ensure that artworks retained by the artist during his lifetime and his archives were catalogued and cared for. The Estate is administered by lawyer and art patron Gregg Schneideman.

"Acting on behalf of the Walters Estate has been a most rewarding exercise. Following the retirement of gallerist Sue Crockford it was necessary to secure the extensive body of Estate works in a public art gallery and appoint a competent dealer gallery to represent the Walters Estate.

"Both have been achieved with the cataloguing, housing and care of the Estate works and archive at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery ensuring the proper care of and access to the works and legacy of one of New Zealand’s greatest artists. Further, the appointment of Starkwhite has ensured the exhibition of Estate works both in New Zealand and overseas which has resulted in Walters' work not only receiving International exposure but also being placed in international art museums."
© 2026. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by The Walters Estate or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Gordon Walters

Chrysanthemum, 1944

Driftwood, 1944

Untitled, 1945

Study for South Canterbury Landscape, 1947

Untitled, 1949

Untitled, 1954

Untitled, 1954

1st study for 'Then', 1955

Untitled, 1955

Untitled, 1956

Untitled, 1956

Untitled, 1956

Untitled, 1960

Claws with Black and Red Ochre, 1960's

Black on white, 1965

Mokoia, 1965-75

Spirals,1966

Study for cover of Ascent, 1969

Untitled, 1970

Thematic Variation 1, 1973

Untitled, 1975

Untitled, 1978

Untitled, 1978-80

Untitled, 1979-80

Untitled, 1987

Untitled, 1987

Untitled (Transparency), 1989

Untitled - Composition with Stripes and Circle, 1990

Untitled - Interlocking Forms, 1994

Untitled geometric, 1994

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Artist of the Day, July 18, 2026 : Thomas Schütte, a German contemporary artist, sculptor (#2582)

When Thomas Schütte made his first figurative sculpture, he discovered it couldn’t stand on its own. He might have built a simple base to anchor the feet and keep it upright, but instead Schütte melted wax in a plastic bucket and sunk the figurine up to its knees. It was a simple solution to a technical problem, but also a powerful visual metaphor. Made in 1982, Mann im Matsch (Man in Mud) was the first in what would later become a decades-long series of men and muck, realized at many scales in many materials, from modeling clay to bronze. The motif was monumentalized in 2009 with Mann im Matsch—der Suchende (Man in Mud—The Seeker), a towering sculpture permanently installed in the plaza of a bank in the artist’s birthplace of Oldenburg, Germany. Schütte transformed this symbol of inertia into one of his most generative series. The recurring figure became an example of his aptitude for leveraging the narrative possibilities of material.

Mann im Matsch was one of the first artworks Schütte created as a recent graduate of the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where he had been enrolled since 1973. There he studied under artists Fritz Schwegler and Gerhard Richter, the art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and visiting lecturers like Richard Serra. Around this time, Schütte also became close with Konrad Fischer, whose gallery exhibited artists such as Hanne Darboven, Richard Long, Robert Ryman, and Bruce Nauman. There, and across West Germany, minimal and Conceptual art loomed large. Art could be anything now, but it didn’t always look like much. Schütte realized that “the most fashionable thing was not to do art, but to have some beams on the floor, or open the windows.” But after creating some early works in this vein—like Relais (Relay, 1979), for which he turned off the lights at Vitrine pour l’Art Actuel in Paris for one second every 30 seconds using an electrical relay—he eventually found himself missing narrative, imagery, and all the things these new artistic movements disavowed. Afterward, Schütte began to reimagine the conventions of painting, drawing, and sculpture while examining the social, political, and psychological conditions that he understood to be inextricably tied to art’s production and reception.

As with the mistake that gave rise to his figures of men stuck in mud, Schütte confronts failures and flaws unapologetically––be they the failures of artistic movements, nations, capitalism, or Western culture itself. Krieger, for example, depicts parodic soldiers that stand nearly 10 feet tall: mighty in stature but wearing bottle caps instead of helmets. Schütte’s artworks take on broad subjects and use scale and position to challenge and surprise, while offering audiences the opportunity to interpret through experience. “It’s better to have this dialogue [about art] without the scaffolding of too much theory or too much philosophy,” Schütte has said. “That makes it too heavy, you can’t stay afloat for long.” Instead, his work speaks through light, line, color, and volume—the artist’s primary tools—to tell stories of the world, big and small.

© 2026. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Thomas Schütte, or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only