Toi Koru tracks the trajectory of Sandy Adsett’s painting practice from the late 1960s to today.

The Māori master of colour and kowhaiwhai, Toi Koru presents the first major survey exhibition of paintings by Dr Sandy Adsett. Twenty-four paintings created over six decades, Toi Koru tracks the trajectory of Adsett’s painting practice from the late 1960s to today. The exhibition features a new series of paintings created especially for the exhibition.

Born in 1939 on the family farm in Raupunga, a small Kahungunu (Ngāti Pahauwera) Māori community just north of Wairoa on the East Coast of the North Island, Adsett has had a hugely successful international career as an artist, but surprisingly he has only ever had two solo exhibitions of his own. Toi Koru will be his third solo exhibition, and his first major retrospective survey. Part of the rationale for this is, as artist and friend Elizabeth Ellis notes in her introduction to the exhibition publication:

“Adsett is one of the most significant and respected Māori artists of his generation. His mahi toi (art) is revered as taonga (treasure) of great significance by Māori across the motu (island), admired also by Indigenous artists internationally who seek him out for advice and camaraderie. Although his mana (reputation) precedes him within te ao Māori (the Māori world) and with iwi taketake (Indigenous peoples) across the world, he is nevertheless our best-kept secret, having never sought the spotlight for his own self-aggrandisement. His work as a Māori artist and educator has always been concerned with lifting the mana and wellbeing of his community. Now is our turn to acknowledge his mana and his accomplishments with this exhibition and publication of his artwork.”

Sandy Adsett received his formal art training from the renowned Ngāti Porou master carver Pine Taiapa (1901-1972) as part of the Education Department’s Art in Schools itinerant teachers training programme of the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the fantastic insights offered by the old master are shared by Adsett in Toi Koru, such as ‘Pine’s twinkle’, the secret ingredient needed to make the perfect koru.

The influence of Western abstraction painters, such as Mondrian and Kandinsky, is equally apparent in many of Adsett’s early paintings, with the artist often choosing to work from a limited palette, or challenging himself to deconstruct the rigid structure of forms derived from the marae to create compositions concerned with line, shape, movement, colour and balance, but doing so without losing the cultural resonance and meaning behind the symbols, colours and patterns.

Many of Adsett’s peer group went on to become important figures in Aotearoa New Zealand art, such as Cath Brown, John Bevan Ford, Fred Graham, Ralph Hotere, Kāterina Mataira, Paratene Matchitt, Marilynn Webb, Cliff Whiting and Selwyn Wilson. From this group of artist-educators came a new generation of Māori painters that included Selwyn Muru, Buck Nin, Kura Te Waru Rewiri, Robert Jahnke, June Grant and many others. Adsett went on to become one of the co-founders of Te Toihoukura School of Māori Art and Design in Gisborne in the mid-1990s and has been the principal tutor at Toimairangi School of Māori Art in Hawkes Bay since 2003.

Toi Koru is significant for Sandy Adsett as an artist, and to recognise his influence as an educator. Adsett and his peers laid the foundation for subsequent generations of Māori artists, curators, educators and museum professionals to pursue a career in the arts industry.