Peter LANYON (English, b.1918, d.1964), Dark Beach, 1962, gouache on paper. Collection of The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū: allocated by the Contemporary Art Society, London, in 1967.

Reverberation: Of Light, Land & Sea is an exhibition of British and New Zealand abstraction inspired by landscape and the sublimity of light, selected by the Director from The Suter and loan collections.

The presentation of this exhibition is not chronological nor is it arranged into stylistic schools. What these artworks have in common is the way in which they depict a move away from representation, and instead present conceptual ideas or abstract notions of our world. The thread linking my choices was an evocative phrase I recently heard, “the reverberation of light”. 

Landscape painting has long been a staple in New Zealand art, so too in Great Britain, so it is only natural that landscape and the play of light could be the leaping off point for abstraction.   “Light is therefore colour” Joseph Mallord William Turner (1777-1851) famously stated in 1818. Regarded as one of the most successful English landscape painters, his revolutionary art reached beyond the confines of the classical composition into a realm between representation and abstraction, his painterly approach revealing the sublimity of light.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that the 20th and 21st century New Zealand and British artists whose works are in this exhibition owe any allegiance to Turner, but there is nevertheless a kinship: of the infinite possibilities of abstracting from nature the reverberations of light - breaking through darkness; illuminating, reflecting, refracting off land, sea and sky; or the paring back of land and seascapes to their fundamental bones; gestural marks as much notional renditions of natural forces as they are revelations of the stuff and action of painting.

 “In nature, light creates the colour.  In the picture, colour creates the light.” Hans Hofmann (1880-1966; German/American renown as an abstract artist and teacher)

Julie Catchpole
Suter Director.