Events Calendar

An exhibition of works by J.S. Parker and Ian Scott.

Ian Scott (1945 - 2013) began as a figurative painter in the 1960s making some striking neo-realist images of young women and landscape in which he used photographs as aids to give a modern Pop Art quality to the imagery. Scott studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts from 1964 to 1967 while Colin McCahon was teaching there. By the early 1970s he gradually evolved various styles of abstraction, producing one series of works in acrylic paint applied in roller strokes to give a non-compositional non-figurative quality. Scott became increasingly aware of American post-painterly abstraction through his study of art magazines and monographs as well as through his contact with artists in the circle of the dealer Petar Vuletic. Vuletic adopted many of the ideas about painting as a pure formal art promulgated by the New York critic Clement Greenberg. It was during the early 1970s that Scott met Gordon Walters, then living in Auckland, whose painting he came to admire. It was against this background that he painted his best-known works in hard-edged abstraction, the Lattice series.

J. S. (John) Parker (1944–2017), was one of the most significant New Zealand painters of his generation. He graduated from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts (Ilam) in 1967 with a Diploma of Fine Arts (Honours). At Ilam, in the early 60s, Parker studied under Rudolf Gopas who fostered the young artist's interest in European and American modernist art. While Parker’s paintings reveal the influence of Mondrian, Rothko and Colin McCahon, as evident in his dramatically reductive, geometrically structured compositions and rich, resonant colour planes, his work is also invigorated by the artist’s love of the dynamic paintwork of Pollock and Monet. 

Location

Gallery 33, Wanaka.