Gordon Walters

Gordon Frederick Walters (24 September 1919 – 5 November 1995) was a Wellington-born artist and graphic designer who is significant to New Zealand culture due to his representation of New Zealand in his Modern Abstract artworks.

Gordon Walters was born and raised in Wellington, where he went to Miramar South School and Rongotai College.

From 1935 to 1939 he studied as a commercial artist at Wellington Technical College under Frederick V. Ellis.

Walters applied to join the army during World War II but was turned down due to medical problems.

He took up a job in the Ministry of Supply doing illustrations.

1941 Gordon Walters French Maid Coffee House, Wellington.

Walters traveled to Australia in 1946 and then visited photographer and painter Theo Schoon in South Canterbury, who was photographing Māori rock art at Ōpihi River.

This visit was central to Walters work as he began using Māori cultural themes in his painting.

Walters had three exhibitions (41, 44, and 47) at the French Maid Coffee House and in 1947 designed the café’s menu.

1949 Gordon Walters Wellington Public Library.

One of the few venues for serious artists at the time the Library had shown an exhibition of Colin McCahon the previous year.

In 1950 Walters moved to Europe where he became influenced by Piet Mondrian, Victor Vasarely and Auguste Herbin.

Although available for house painting in New Zealand as early as 1952, there is no public record of its use by artists until 1962.

On his return to New Zealand in 1953, Walters began to fuse abstract modernism with traditional Māori art.

In the early fifties Walters' designs progressed and New Zealand shapes and ideas, in particular the Māori koru form, became important themes.

His design straightened the stem of the koru in a way not seen in customary Māori contexts.

Walters stated “My work is an investigation of positive/ negative relationships within a deliberately limited range of forms; the forms I use have no descriptive value in themselves and are used solely to demonstrate relations.

I believe that dynamic relations are most clearly expressed by the repetition of a few simple elements.”

In 1956 Walters made the initial studies for the painting that would become his first koru painting, Te Whiti.

As art historian Michael Dunn noted, ‘Perfecting that motif took some eight years of dedicated labour.’ In 1964 Walters made the first large scale (1220 x 915mm) koru painting that has survived.

It was titled after the Māori spiritual leader Te Whiti-o-Rongomai (Te Āti Awa) and may also reference Te Whiti Street in Kilbirnie Wellington where Walters lived as a child.

Some critics have found this possible personal reference to be at odds with Walters’ insistence on the works being seen as purely abstract.

For Te Whiti Walters used hardboard and a co polymer of PVA.

Now known as acrylic, this material was relatively new at the time.

Since the return of the work from the Hays Competition the painting has been known as Te Whiti and it is this title that is inscribed on the back of the painting along with the year 1964 and the artist’s name.

Te Whiti was not included in the New Vision Gallery exhibition Gordon Walters: Painting 1965 and Walters submitted it instead to the Hays Ltd Art Competition as Painting 1965.

1965 Gordon Walters: Painting 1965, New Vision Gallery, Auckland.

The first major exhibition of Water’s koru based paintings.

Te Whiti has been owned privately since 1966 and has been exhibited on only a few occasions.

A year after the Hays Competition it was shown in Wellington as Te Whiti in the exhibition Abstract Paintings by Forty New Zealand Artists, Wellington Art Club, New Zealand Display Centre, Wellington.

At that stage it was owned by Ralph S. Von Kohorn.

Walters' best known work, Maheno, was painted in 1981 and is also part of Walters ongoing koru series.

Like Te Whiti the painting brings both Māori and European ideas together through geometric abstraction and Māori culture expressed through both image and language with the koru and the title 'Maheno' in Māori.

Koru is a Māori word that has now become part of mainstream New Zealand English, describing the growing tip of a fern frond.

In 1983 Te Whiti was included in Gordon Walters Auckland City Art Gallery (now known as Auckland Art Gallery / Toi o Tāmaki).

The City Gallery Wellington included the painting in the 2001 Parihaka: the Art of Resistance.

It was last exhibited publicly in 2017 in Gordon Walters: New Vision, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

In 2023 the Walters Estate published an edition of 100 screen prints of Te Whiti embossed with the Estate’s blind stamp.

In the same year, to coincide with the publication of Francis Pound's book Gordon Walters, Glorious  Digital produced a digital version of Te Whiti in an edition of 100.

The package included the digital reproduction of the work, Francis Pound’s book (a detail from Te Whiti features on the cover) and a small, printed version of the painting.