Robyn Kahukiwa’s Mahuika had been hanging in plain sight for years when the New Zealand Portrait Gallery launched its nationwide campaign to locate it and seven other artworks by the artist missing from the official register. Countless students of the Wellington college where it resides had sat in her company while studying or browsing the library, many of whom came forward when they saw the painting and the gallery’s call out in The Post on 2 January 2024. 

It’s hard to imagine how a work such as Mahuika could ever slip into institutional obscurity, but it’s easy to see why it was remembered so vividly by those who had encountered it. Kahukiwa paints the titular goddess perched atop a peak of flames, her eyes forming deep black pools. Nude except for the heru and huia feathers in her hair, glittering maro, and her signature fiery fingernails, the atua of fire could be likened to an RnB seductress posing for her album cover. The painting’s celebratory portrayal of the female body and womanhood, shown as one pillar of a vast cosmos of life and what comes after, is characteristic of Kahukiwa’s ‘Wāhine Toa’ series (1980–82), a collection of paintings depicting atua wāhine from Māori mythology to which several of the missing works belong. These paintings toured Aotearoa between 1983 and 1984, and achieved further prominence following the publication of an illustrated book of the same name created in collaboration with writer Patricia Grace, which helped to cement Kahukiwa’s work and this pantheon of feminine icons in the popular imagination for a whole generation. 

The New Zealand Portrait Gallery hopes Kahukiwa’s prescient work and worldview will resonate with a new generation of young people on the occasion of a new exhibition of her work, curated by Roma Pōtiki and presented in collaboration with Te Manawa. The exhibition will be the artist’s first solo show at a large public gallery in several years, following a significant presentation of her work at last year’s Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. It is set to open at their Queen’s Wharf premises in August this year before embarking on a nationwide tour, and will include works from throughout Kahukiwa’s long career. Having always been forthright in her commitment to “the Indigenous gaze,” as Cameron Ah Loo-Matamua put it in a recent essay on the artist for Art News, Kahukiwa’s body of work constitutes an expansive archive of contemporary Māori experience from the 1970s to now.

With the absence of these works, however, the archive remains incomplete. Though Mahuika was recovered swiftly, as was The Bone of Enchantment and Knowledge, the gallery is still looking for information about the works pictured below. The works sought—two paintings and four pencil drawings—were created by Kahukiwa in the 1980s and are suspected to have been acquired for private collections. “We are thrilled to have found one important painting in our search,” says Jaenine Parkinson, the New Zealand Portrait Gallery’s Director, “but we are still on the hunt for other art works by Kahukiwa and appreciate any leads the public might have.” If readers have any information regarding the whereabouts of these artworks, they should contact the gallery via their website.