HOPE, GABRIELLE (1916-1962)

Karekare II" (c.1955)
Watercolour
57 x 44cm
Details on verso
*private collection, Sydney
 
Hope was an important, groundbreaking New Zealand Modernist & Expressionist. She studied at the Elam School of Fine Arts but was also self-taught, and exhibited her work at the Society of Arts in Hamilton and Auckland. She was best known for her gouache and watercolours, where she made her most adventurous explorations of Fauvism, Surrealism and Cubism, before settling into a gestural Expressionist course. Motifs, symbolism and composition came from her surroundings. Absorbing lessons in paint from Frances Hodgkins, she loosened her brushwork and dissolved still life into landscape. Dreams surfaced in her work. She studied Chinese calligraphy, the Tao of painting, the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Buddhism and George Gurdjieff. Amongst her circle of friends, which included Colin McCahon, her bold, intuitive and expressive drawings were much respected and admired. By 1956, her work had been bought for public collections from exhibitions at the Auckland Society of Arts and from her 1957 solo show with dealer Peter Webb. Colin McCahon included eight of her works in the nationally touring exhibition of five watercolour painters which he curated for the Auckland Art Gallery in 1958. It has been suggested that Gabrielle Hope’s untimely death at the age of 46 years has led to her becoming one of the most unjustly neglected painters of her generation. A huge retrospective of her work, "Lyric Watercolours", was exhibited at the University Of Auckland in 2008. This incredible landscape of the North West coast of New Zealand is very rare.