Dame Louise Henderson (1902-1994) was a pioneer of abstraction in New Zealand and one of few female career painters of her generation. Her phenomenal and influential career left a remarkable body of work now held in all major public collections in Aotearoa.
Born in Paris in 1902, Henderson moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1925 to be with her new husband, Hubert Henderson – a New Zealander. Cultivated by her European experience and engaged in her immediate surroundings, her works were simultaneously local and international. Her earliest works offered thoughtful and detailed observations of her new environment, and she became known particularly for her cubist and modernist works which showcase her expressive use of colour.
Establishing herself as a central figure in the local art scene, Henderson would go on to work alongside major figures including Rita Angus, John Weeks, Colin McCahon and Milan Mrkusich. She later described the social and creative freedom of those early years in New Zealand as “like opening a door for a bird to fly”.’
Untitled [Still life with vase] (1987) was painted well into her career, in her mid-eighties. The work embraces cubism, seen through the geometric patterning and flattened perspectives of the table and vase, but her use of bright colour evokes the abstracted form and atmosphere of the New Zealand landscape. At this time, she was living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, with her artist studio located in Mount Eden and surrounded by native bush. This landscape would inform her later series of works, drawing inspiration from the view outside her window.
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū co-curated a large retrospective exhibition titled Louise Henderson: From Life (2019-2020). The curators noted, ‘despite the seemingly dramatic shifts in style, which have been too easily dismissed as a dependency on different international art movements, Henderson’s oeuvre maintains a rigorous consistency. She sought to convey the essence of her subject through a complex visual language of layered and interlocking shapes’. Full of bold, colourful observations of life and nature alongside her abstracted still-life compositions, the exhibition celebrated her decades-long career as a strong-minded, experimental and instinctive artist.
Henderson’s artistic expression also included embroidery, stained glass, and tapestry, and she had a lifetime commitment to education. Born into an era in society where female artists and writers were not treated with the same respect as their male counterparts, Henderson is now rightly recognised as highly significant to Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. Louise Henderson was honoured to become Dame Louise Henderson in 1992, one of only three woman New Zealand artists to achieve such acclaim.

References:
https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/blog/media-release/2020/06/missing-louise-henderson-artwork-to-be-shown-in-ch