Melvin Day

A Modernist Perspective explores Day’s art practice over seven decades and begins with some of Day's earliest surviving works, dating back to his teenage years in the 1930s while a part-time student at Elam School of Fine Art. Paintings central to each successive decade follow and the exhibition concludes with large modernist landscapes of Fiordland, painted just a few years before his death in 2016.

Born in Hamilton in 1923, Day was a radical painter, particularly in his youth, but also a great believer in tradition. In recent years, his early Cubist-inclined paintings have reinstated him – alongside John Weeks, and Louise Henderson – as an important figure in mid-20th century New Zealand art. Day's early explorations of cubism in the 1950s laid the foundations for modernist abstractions of the 70s and underpin the monumental faceted landscapes of the 80s, for which he became best known.