COMMING SOON
Experience the bold brilliance of Toi Koru, the first major survey exhibition of paintings by Māori master of colour and kōwhaiwhai, Dr Sandy Adsett.
Spanning six decades, this remarkable exhibition traces the trajectory of Adsett’s painting practice from the 1960s to today - including a striking new series painted 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 received his formal art training from the renowned Ngati 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.
Adsett went on to become one of the co-founders of Te Toihokura School of Māori Art and Design in Gisborne mid-1990s and has been the principal tutor at Toimarangi School of Māori Art in Hawkes Bay since 2003.
Toi Koru is a must-see celebration of one of the most significant and respected Māori artists and educators of his generation, showing at Nelson Provincial Museum Pupuri Taonga o Te Tai Ao until 2 November 2025.
Sandy Adsett, Poutipi (detail), c.1998. Acrylic on board. Collection of the artist.
Sponsored by:
Supported by:
Temporary Exhibition
Date: 8 August - 2 November
Price: FREE