LOVELY RITA

There was a time – and it may come again – when Rita Angus prints were on household walls up and down the country, especially landscapes such as Cass and Fog, Hawke’s Bay. Both these feature in Te Papa’s upcoming retrospective of her works. But it seems that outside New Zealand, quite a few people have never heard of one of our most revered artists of the mid-20th century. Certainly not Royal Academy of Arts chief curator Adrian Locke, a recent convert and one of the movers behind the Te Papa show, titled Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist.

The exhibition should have opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last September, where Angus would have been displayed alongside Tracey Emin and Marina Abramović, but Covid-19 forced its cancellation.

“It would have been fascinating to exhibition in 2018. He saw at the Christchurch Art Gallery and asked my colleague, ‘Who’s Rita Angus?’ and it all went from there.”