A Flight Through Time: Don Binney

Gow Langsford is delighted to present a landmark solo exhibition celebrating the work of Don Binney (1940-2012), one of Aotearoa’s most distinctive painters. With a remarkable practice that spanned over five decades, this exhibition honours a career deeply rooted in the artist’s sustained engagement with our native birds and distinctive landscapes. Ranging from Otago’s rolling hills to kererū (wood pigeon) soaring over Te Henga, this is the first major exhibition of Binney’s paintings in over 20 years, highlighting his enduring connection to place, form and the unique beauty of Aotearoa.

Widely recognised as a leading figure in New Zealand painting during the 1960s, Binney is best known for his stylised depictions of birds poised in flight or stillness, suspended against the contours of rolling hills and sweeping skies. Early in his career these forms appeared in abstract, indeterminate spaces, with the landscape rendered as bold curves and richly textured surfaces. Working exclusively in oil on board in the first half of the sixties, these works laid the foundation for Binney’s unique synthesis of natural observation and formal abstraction.

Over time his landscapes became more specific, with the compositions becoming those of recognisable environments, particularly of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s dramatic west coast. At the heart of this connection lies Te Henga (Bethells Beach), a site of enduring personal and artistic significance. Featured consistently throughout the exhibition, Te Henga is not merely a backdrop in Binney’s paintings – it is a subject invoked repeatedly across the decades in works that chart his deep and sustained engagement with the land.

Notable inclusions in the exhibition include large-scale works Over Kawaupaku, Te Henga (1967), Pacific Frigate Bird III (1968) and Kereru over Wainamu Te Henga (1965). These works are a celebration of Binney’s ability to command a sense of space and flight. Here, Binney transforms sky and sea into vast, uninterrupted fields of colour, with the birds held in perfect tension against the landscapes beneath. Binney’s influences included the bold outlines and hard-edged forms of 1960s Pop Art, and many of his most iconic works feature a mural-like flatness and clarity, often rendered in striking acrylic hues. Evident in other works in the show such as Kaka, Stewart Island (1964), Jenny’s Kereru, Te Henga (1964) and the significant Under the Moon (1969-70) is Binney’s tendency to combine multiple painting techniques within a single surface: an impastoed bird may float above a smooth, graphic sky, while rugged terrain is suggested by palette knife textures below.

Binney’s interest in birds was lifelong and informed by a keen dedication to ornithology and birdwatching. His paintings, while stylised and simplified, are faithful to avian anatomy and behaviour – capturing postures, markings, and the sense of movement with careful precision. As art historian Damian Skinner states, Binney offered the visual effect of watching a bird through high-powered binoculars as the source of the “characteristic disjunction of scale between bird and landscape in his paintings.” [1] Gregory O’Brien states that Binney’s birds are “co-equal” to landscapes in his paintings, that “there was never an issue, in his mind, as to whether he was a bird or landscape painter – it was always fundamentally about the space between those two subjects.” [2]

While often aligned with the Regionalist tradition, alongside contemporaries such as Michael Smither and Robyn White, Binney himself resisted strict categorisation. He saw his work not as an attempt to define a national identity, but rather as a personal response to the natural world, a celebration of Aotearoa’s land, sea, and sky. Still, his paintings resonate powerfully with New Zealand audiences, evoking a shared sense of place and the expansive freedom of the wide, open skies that his birds so often inhabit.

This exhibition invites viewers to follow Binney’s artistic journey, with a focus on his oil works from the 1960s and extending to one of his final paintings Huia Bay, Spurwing II which he completed in 2010. A Flight Through Time offers a rare chance to view works held in private collections, the majority of which have not been publicly exhibited in many years.

Gow Langsford wishes to acknowledge all lenders for their generosity in making this exhibition possible.