© 2011-14 Sait Akkirman, including all photographs.

A Continuous Line: The Art of Dennis K. Turner curated by Richard Wolfe.

Seventy art works by this renegade expatriate will be presented together for the first time in a large scale survey exhibition curated by the king of kiwiana, historian Richard Wolfe and toured by the Gus Fisher Gallery at The University of Auckland.

Dennis K. Turner illustrated Barry Crump’s books, made murals for the trade unions, celebrated Māori and worked as a tour guide at Waitomo. Notoriously, he is the only New Zealand artist to have ever been arrested and convicted for painting on a Sunday.

His collected works will delight gallery visitors and demonstrate what it meant to be a kiwi artist in the mid twentieth century.

Turner was commissioned by the union movement to celebrate the skilled trades of carpentry, building, transport and engineering in Auckland in a series of mural panels completed in 1948.

An exploration of oceanic themes derived from Kai Tahu rock art followed. In Wellington, Turner entered the orbit of Theo Schoon and Gordon Walters, whose paintings made reference to Māori motifs such as the tiki and koru.

Working as a guide in the Waitomo caves in the 1950s, he rambled through the South Waikato, depicting remnant bush and pastoral plenty.

His first book illustrations were for Arthur Manning’s startling “study in abnormal psychology”, The Bodgie. His characterisation of the type was loosely based on James Dean.

Barry Crump’s tales of hunting, shooting and fishing in A Good Keen Man inspired a Turner drawing of the archetypal kiwi bloke of the bush: rough and ready, booted and bearded.

Turner’s experience of the funeral of Princess Te Puea in 1952 inspired his moving pictorial account published in 1963 as Tangi.

Sheep shearing and outlines of head shapes full of landscape imagery were his preoccupations in the 1960s. He also celebrated the rebellious Hone Heke flaunting his tattooed buttocks as he wields the axe in the direction of a flagpole bearing a Union Jack, some of the last works he completed before leaving for Britain in 1964.

He returned to New Zealand once, in 1992, painting many watercolours of tiki. These loop back to his early interest in Māori art, forming a line of continuity maintained over six decades.

 

(Reproduced from Gus Fisher Gallery press release.)

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