This event is sold out.
Join us for a tour of Melvin Day: A Modernist Perspective, the first Wellington showing of this significant collection of works which are an iteration of the 2019 Waikato Museum exhibition, with it’s curator Mark Hutchins-Pond.
A key figure in mid-20th century New Zealand art, Wellington artist Melvin Day produced some of the most intellectually astute paintings in New Zealand art history. A Modernist Perspective explores Day’s art practice over seven decades and begins with some of Day’s earliest surviving works, dating back to his teenage years in the 1930s while a part-time student at Elam School of Fine Art. Paintings central to each successive decade follow and the exhibition concludes with large modernist landscapes of Fiordland, painted just a few years before his death in 2016.
Day’s early explorations of cubism in the 1950s laid the foundations for modernist abstractions of the 70s and underpin the monumental faceted landscapes of the 80s, for which he became best known.
We will also be in time to see Melvin Day — the legacy, Still Life and Landscape works from the Oroya & Melvin Day Charitable Trust collection before this ends on January 30th. Each year the Oroya & Melvin Day Charitable Trust sell a carefully selected number of artworks from the Trust’s collection to fund their scholarship and grants programme.
After the guided tour and talk from Mark you are welcome to stay for lunch at Kaizen Café, and explore the museum further.
Feature image: Detail from: Orongorongo, 1982 oil on canvas Collection of BNZ. Image provided and reproduced courtesy of Pataka.