This is Robin White
That Dame Robin White is going from strength to strength as an artist well into her eighth decade was powerfully attested in her recent exhibition Aio ngaira (this is us), at McLeavey Gallery, Wellington in August and September. Although it was sadly curtailed by the Covid-19 lockdown, I was nonetheless able to attend the opening, harangue a collector into acquiring the two most remarkable works on show (‘Don’t fool around!’ I counselled), and to meet for the first time the gracious, quietly effective artist who seems utterly unfazed by the fact that her works on paper can now fetch higher prices than those by canonical immortals like Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Augustus John.
comprises Robin White old and new; the former is evident in a series of charcoal drawings collectively entitled , which date from 1981. At the time, ‘us’ represented New Zealanders disturbed by the Springbok rugby tour and, in turn, White’s concern for the fate of fellow Baháʼí Faith members living in the fundamentalist Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini. Impressively and economically effective though they are, to me these drawings represent the more ‘familiar’ Robin White, whereas my jaw (‘this is us’ in Kiribati), their paint barely dry from the studio.
