The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy
23 August - 23 November 2014
Gallery 11a
This exhibition rediscovers the life and work of one of New Zealand's most talented and original artists. Percy left this country in the mid-1960s and became a hugely respected artist/illustrator/typographer overseas, while at the same time producing a remarkable body of his own independent art.
The main visual focus of the exhibition is a series of around 60 large and medium scale drawings. These include a suite of anthropomorphized kiwis, travelling around the world and through time - a marvellously inventive, anarchic exploration of the national psyche. Virtuosic drawings from earlier in Percy’s career convey a sense of his remarkable technical prowess, and his boundless imagination.
Image: A Kiwi in Venice, 2004, ink and pencil, 280 x 379 mm. Shown with permission of the Estate of Graham Percy.