34. Ralph Hotere 1931 - 2013
Black Rainbow
Oil stick on paper
65 x 50 cm
Signed, inscribed 'Port Chalmers' & dated 1991
est. $30,000 - 40,000
Relative Size: Black Rainbow
Relative size

Provenance:
Private Collection, Auckland

Hotere's Black Rainbow series was originally conceived in the 1980s: these paintings comprised a didactic and elementally mournful response to the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.

Several years later, in the early 1990s, Hotere renewed his engagement with the subject of the Rainbow Warrior and produced this newer version of Black Rainbow. Into that icon of hope and protest, the artist once again poured the black stickiness of pigmented tar, draining the rainbow of all life. But most strikingly, the return to form this time involved an infusion of colour into which he has added blue, brown, red and gold.

Through Black Rainbow, we are able to encounter the raw spirit of the artist as activist and protestor. Perhaps as a result of the circumspection offered by time, the work has been conceived through a more abstract lens than those earlier works. Religious imagery such as the dove and Sacred Heart have been replaced by more subtle deployments of geometric form: take the golden rectangle which brushes the upper-right edge of the canvas. This is the Rainbow Warrior itself, now a ghost ship, buoyed along by a neat red horizon of blood.

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