Geoff Thornley

Thornley (b.1942) is a protagonist in pure abstraction in this country, having worked within the genre for over four decades. This exhibition showcases a significant time within the artist’s oeuvre, from the beginning of his geometric, mixed-media practice in 1972, through to the Constructions era from the late 1970s to 1990. As the name suggests, the Constructions period showed the artist honing his use of form and colour. In 1974 his mixed media on paper series, Albus, began an exploration of an increasingly simplified composition, allowing a newfound focus on materiality and surface quality. The resulting works had a quality of light and space that hadn’t been seen before in his work, and one that exists within his work today.

This collection of paintings brings together works by seminal New Zealand abstract painters Milan Mrkusich (b.1925) and Geoff Thornley (b. 1942). As the transition from representation to abstraction occurred in New Zealand art history in the mid-twentieth century, abstract artists faced widespread antagonism. As a young artist Mrkusich’s works were often met with criticism as they outlandishly deterred from the well-known regional concerns of contemporaries such as Colin McCahon and Rita Angus, yet by the 1970s he was firmly established as a leading exponent of modernist art in New Zealand. Thornley, seventeen years his junior, has similarly remained loyal to abstraction and throughout his career has engaged with explorations of colour and its emotive effects. Spanning two decades, the works in Milan Mrkusich and Geoff Thornley provide a snapshot of twentieth century New Zealand abstraction, comparing and contrasting two painters who, through their commitment to abstraction, have both emerged as influential artists of their generation.