Media Release: 30 March 2017 – for immediate release
Leo Bensemann & Friends: Portraiture and The Group
Curated by Peter Simpson
Exhibition dates: 12 April to 28 May 2017
Opening Event: 11 April, 6pm at the Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre
Curated by Peter Simpson for the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Wellington, the Wallace Arts Trust is hosting Leo Bensemann & Friends: Portraiture and The Group, an intriguing exhibition showcasing the portrait paintings by The Group, a collective of outstanding 20th century New
Zealand artists.
Portraits by and of Leo Bensemann are foremost among 50 outstanding examples created by the Christchurch-based artists
known as The Group, in the middle decades of last century. Drawn from private and public collections, names such as
Evelyn Page, Olivia Spencer Bower, Rita Angus, Toss Woollaston, Doris Lusk and Colin McCahon come to life as both
subjects and artists.
Collectively, says curator Peter Simpson, these artists re-invented the art of portraiture for their time and place, and
provided images of their contemporaries which are vividly alive and still speak eloquently to us living in another
century.
Bensemann is at the heart of this exhibition because of all these painters, who knew each other well and belonged to the
same social networks, he favoured portraiture above all else. He is given priority, Simpson says, not because he is
“better” than his friends and fellow Group members but because he is currently the least well-known of these, the
leading visual artists of their generation, and is worthy of equal recognition as a portrait artist.
Peter Simpson is the author of Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann (2011) and Bloomsbury South: The Arts in Christchurch 1933–1953 (AUP, 2016), shortlisted for the Ockham Book Awards 2017, and telling of the remarkable two decades in Christchurch
where the works of a group of extraordinary men and women, artists, composers and writers, redefined the New Zealand’s
mid-century cultural life.
Thank you to the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pukenga Whakaata for making this exhibition possible.
Exhibition Talks
• Wednesday 12 April, 1:30pm: Curator’s Talk with Peter Simpson
• Sunday 30 April, 1:30pm: Curator Peter Simpson in conversation with Michael Dunn, Emeritus Professor in Fine Arts at
the University of Auckland.
• Sunday 28 May, 1pm: Curator Peter Simpson in conversation with Linda Taylor, Director of the Centre for Art Studies at
the University of Auckland.
ENDS