Bill Culbert, 'Blind Window', 1991, Photo courtesy of the artist and Fox Jensen McCrory Gallery
Photo Credit
Bill Culbert & Ralph Hotere, Sue Crockford Gallery, 1992 Post Black 7 & 1, 1992 Image courtesy of the Pip and Bill Culbert Family Trust
Photo Credit
From early in his life, Bill Culbert repeatedly tugged at the deeply set anchor tethering him to New Zealand’s shores. Determined to set sail for Europe, he was happily and fatefully the recipient of a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art. In London in 1957, where he would not only be exempted from the tediousness of the New Zealand’s provincial art debates, but find context and embrace amidst the flourishing London artworld - and critically he would meet British artist Pip Culbert, with whom he would then go on to establish a new life in the much softer, foreign southern light of Croagnes, France. And yet for all his resistance of the intellectual chill of the provincial, it is the work of Bill Culbert’s that I think of as being the most distilled, the most emblematic and ultimately the most poetic account of his and our shared place. Avoiding the romanticism and theatre of McCahon & Fomison, the kitsch of Scott and Frizzell and the ‘timely’ illustrations of Robinson and Cotton, Culbert’s sculptures and photographs manage to condense the contradictions and emotional chiaroscuro that existing in the geographical nexus between New Zealand and the rest of the world confers.
From early in his life, Bill Culbert repeatedly tugged at the deeply set anchor tethering him to New Zealand’s shores. Determined to set sail for Europe, he was happily and fatefully the recipient of a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art. In London in 1957, where he would not only be exempted from the tediousness of the New Zealand’s provincial art debates, but find context and embrace amidst the flourishing London artworld - and critically he would meet British artist Pip Culbert, with whom he would then go on to establish a new life in the much softer, foreign southern light of Croagnes, France. And yet for all his resistance of the intellectual chill of the provincial, it is the work of Bill Culbert’s that I think of as being the most distilled, the most emblematic and ultimately the most poetic account of his and our shared place. Avoiding the romanticism and theatre of McCahon & Fomison, the kitsch of Scott and Frizzell and the ‘timely’ illustrations of Robinson and Cotton, Culbert’s sculptures and photographs manage to condense the contradictions and emotional chiaroscuro that existing in the geographical nexus between New Zealand and the rest of the world confers.
