Olivia Spencer Bower Queenstown and the Lake from the Snowfields date unknown. Watercolour and pencil. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1976
Olivia Spencer Bower Towards the Museum c. 1970. Watercolour and charcoal. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1972
This exhibition is now closed
A selection of watercolours by one of Canterbury’s most treasured artists.
Drawn from the Gallery’s extensive collection of Olivia Spencer Bower’s work, this exhibition presents a selection of South Island views – from the flowers in the artist’s Christchurch garden to the mighty Remarkables mountain range and Southern Lakes of Central Otago. Together they highlight her uncompromising approach to, and total mastery of, the watercolour medium. Spencer Bower was a key modernist figure in the New Zealand art world during the mid twentieth century. She specialised in watercolours, which was a medium she enjoyed immensely, and developed a distinctive style and technique throughout her career.
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Date:
4 November 2016 – 2 April 2017 -
Exhibition number:
1026
Collection works in this exhibition
Related reading: Watercolour, New Zealand
Notes
Happy Birthday Olivia
April seems to be the month for birthdays and today we salute Olivia Spencer Bower (1905-1982)
Artist Profile
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In the strange, stunned afterlife that ticked slowly by in the first few years following Christchurch’s February 2011 earthquake, a curious note of recognition sounded through the shock and loss. As a massive programme of demolitions relentlessly hollowed out the city, many buildings were incompletely removed and lingered on for months as melancholy remains – stumps abandoned in a forlorn urban forest. Hideous, sculptural, beautiful; they bore compelling resemblance to a body of paintings created in the city more than three decades earlier.
Article
Exquisite Treasure Revealed
Canterbury Museum holds two albums compiled by Diamond Harbour artist Margaret Stoddart. The older of the two, containing images featured in this Bulletin, and itself currently exhibited in the Gallery, covers the period 1886–96. The album is handsomely bound in maroon, and stamped M.O.S. in gold. It contains a sort of travelogue by way of black and white photographs set amongst decorative painting, mostly of native flora, with some locality and date information.
Exhibition
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Iconic and unseen early photographs of Christchurch by Laurence Aberhart