Colin McCahon's painting Victory over death 2 (1970)
Colin John McCahon (1919 - 1987) was a prominent New Zealand artist. During his life he also worked in art galleries and as a university lecturer. Some of McCahon's best-known works are wall-sized paintings with a dark background, overlaid with religious words in stark white, and wildly varying in size, for example, "Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is", 1958/59. He was also an extensive landscape painter, inspired in part by the writings of New Zealand geologist Sir Charles A. Cotton. Although his works tend to generate a good deal of controversy, he is widely regarded as one of New Zealand's greatest artists.[verification needed] Along with Rita Angus and Toss Woollaston he is credited with introducing modern styles to New Zealand art in the early 20th century. Image File history File links Colin_mccahon_victory_over_death_2. ... Image File history File links Colin_mccahon_victory_over_death_2. ... 1919 (MCMXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Sir Charles Andrew Cotton (b. ... Rita Angus (12 March 1908 - 27 January 1970) is a New Zealand painter. ... Mountford Tosswill Toss Woollaston KBE (1910-1998) was one of the most important New Zealand painters of the 20th century. ...
ColinMcCahon is a prophet in our midst, an Old Testament figure who uses the role of the artist to rail against man's inhumanity to man and the landscape and who bares his soul continually in his work in order to teach by example.
John Caselberg, in his consideration of McCahon's The Shining Cuckoo, 1974, has written eloquently of this event, and of this part of the North Island's west coast, which in Maori tradition, is the pathway of the spirits of the recent dead on their way to Cape Reinga, the leaping-off point to Hawaiki.
In this smoulderingly beautiful painting McCahon depicts the brooding majesty of the Urewera country and also the inseparable bond between the people and the land which is the very essence of maoritanga and which should be the heritage of all New Zealanders.
McCahon was an artist of unique and complex vision in the history of New Zealand, producing a singular brand of modernist painting that sought to make art, even in its most abstract forms, 'capable of philosophy'.
McCahon's work was grounded in the landscapes of New Zealand and it was the landscape that served predominantly as a vehicle for his propositions regarding the relation of the individual to physical and metaphysical worlds.
McCahon's One and A Letter to Hebrews (Rain in Northland) are brought into dialogue here with two works by Rosalie Gascoigne, a pairing that pays homage to a larger exhibition in 1990 that examined the conceptual distinctions and inter-sections between each artist's vision of the landscape, the reconstruction of language and senses of place.
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