Artwork Information

Once singled out as ‘the only New Zealand artist with a real claim to association with these features of the art of Braque, Picasso and Metzinger’, Louise Henderson is arguably Aotearoa New Zealand's pre-eminent cubist painter. She engaged with Cubism’s intellectual vein and developed an early and influential abstract style of painting in the 1950s. Cubism introduced a cerebral charge to Henderson’s work, encouraging her to challenge traditional representations of optical experience in favour of an independent and exploratory vision. The period from the late 1940s to the end of the 1950s was, arguably, Henderson’s most productive phase as she explored a range of cubist techniques, penetrating beneath the surface of the appearance of form to cast the underlying geometric structures as the subjects of her work.