Artwork Information

Hotere executed Drawings for Black Paintings. Human Rights Series just after he completed the antiwar ‘Sangro’ (1962-64) and anticolonial ‘Algérie’ series of 1962-63. At upper left is a cruciform shape that resembles Long Red Line (1964), a painting in the Chartwell Collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki that is part of the pro-social justice and anti-imperial ‘Human Rights’ series. At lower left are five squares configured into a chevron, the same shape as Black Painting: Human Rights Series (1964) in the collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. A tear in the paper slices in half the artist’s self-portrait at bottom right. Varying the density of the hatchings in the sketches of the three shaped paintings rendered in this drawing, Hotere was attempting to replicate the subtle tonal variations of American artist Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings in the medium of pen and ink.