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Gordon Frederick Walters was born in Wellington on September 24th, 1919. He trained at Wellington Technical College (1939-40). In 1946 he began his studies of Polynesian art, which led to a series of abstract paintings. He visited Europe in 1950, where he was impressed by the works of Piet Mondrian, Victor Vasarely and Auguste Herbin. He returned to Wellington in 1953. Between 1956 and 1966 he evolved the distinctive formal language of his mature style, in which elements from Maori decorative art are synthesized with European geometric abstraction. Most of the paintings he produced after 1964 are formally related through the use of the same few distinctive elements, most notably the koru motif, a stem with a curving bulblike termination found in Maori moko (tattoo patterns) and kowhaiwhai (patterns painted on house rafters and canoe hulls). Walters transformed the Maori prototype, which is hand-drawn and organic, into a severe geometric form constructed with precise, ruled lines and compass-drawn circular terminations, for example in Painting No. 1 (1965; Auckland, C.A.G.). Walters used ambiguities of readings between figure and ground as well as optical effects such as dazzle and after-images to create perceptual movement and space in two-dimensional, non-illusionistic paintings. There are some affinities with the works of Giuseppe Capogrossi and Bridget Riley. Walters moved to Christchurch in 1976. His work is represented in most public collections in New Zealand, in the National Gallery, Canberra, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Gordon Walters died on November 5th, 1995.
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