Alan Pearson

Alan Pearson (b.1929, d. 2019) is a key figure in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand’s 20th and 21st century art. He has been one of the outstanding proponents of pure painting in Aotearoa. The artist’s work is densely complex, restlessly explorative, and remains true to the ethos of Neo-Expressionism; alive with gesture, emotion and insight.

Pearson’s training at the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts (ILAM) coincided with the arrival of the Lithuanian artist and educator Rudi Gopas in 1959. This placed Pearson in context with the likes of Philip Clairmont, Tony Fomison, and Allen Maddox - a veritable blossoming of Neo-Expressionists during this period.

Pearson’s idiosyncratic vision and individualism, further honed at London’s Royal Academy Schools in London in 1965-6 and a lifetime of development, makes him impossible to categorise with ease. The artist’s work ranges from abstraction to portraiture and everything is tackled with the same vigour and precision.

There is a profound theatricality in Pearson’s art, not merely in the gestural bravura of his brushwork, but in the direct reference (the marvellous, immediate and intimate sketches of his beloved opera, reminiscent in spirit of similar sketches by Walter Sickert or Degas) and allusion (the framing proscenium arch that makes a stage of Pearson’s well-known 1986 self-portrait ‘Exit from a Cold Theatre’ in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū). 

- Words by Dr. Andrew Paul Wood

Pearson’s works are held in the collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Pōneke Wellington; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki; Hocken Pictorial Collections, University of Otago; University of Otago Medical School, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland; Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu; Te Manawa, Te Papa-i-Oea Palmerston North; The Arts House Trust, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland; Waikato Museum, Kirikiriroa Hamilton; Alexander Turnbull Library, The National Library of New Zealand, Wellington; Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru; Chartwell Collection, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland; Forrester Gallery, Oamaru; The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson; The New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Wellington; The Rutherford Trust Collection, Wellington and the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, England.

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