Ray Haydon - Seventy Five: Preview Catalogue

Opening - Thursday 13th November 5.30-6.30pm

Sanderson are pleased to present the exhibition Seventy Five by Ray Haydon. Celebrating his seventy fifth year the exhibition explores the artist's dynamic and varied oeuvre spanning over two decades.

Haydon’s practice is celebrated for its deep engagement with the physical and conceptual properties of space. His works are held in many private collections worldwide, and have featured in major sculpture exhibitions in Aotearoa including NZ Sculpture OnShore, Shapeshifter Wellington, NZ Sculpture on the Gulf, and the Aotearoa Art Fair Sculpture Court. Haydon’s works have been featured in publications including Art News, Art New Zealand, ArtZone, The New Zealand Herald, Urbis, Denizen and Sothebys magazine.

Haydon’s approach is rooted in a fascination with negativespace, the voids shaped by solid dynamic forms in the frozen illusion of motion. He describes his process as “painting the air,” with flowing, spiralling  lines that shift as viewers move around them. This combines with the artist’s experiments in materials: bronze, corten steel, stainless steel, wood and carbon fibre – the artist often pushing them to their aesthetic and structural limits.

In his desire to capture the essence of movement, velocity and space in static three dimensional forms, Haydon follows the tradition laid down by Brâncuși’s Endless Column, projected as an infinite line beyond its physical structure. And the playful, theatrical tension of the Bauhaus – Paul Klee’s “taking a line for a walk”, rings true throughout his work.  

Haydon’s pieces continue to evolve over time; the artist driven by a relentless curiosity and commitment to material innovation. In this latest exhibition, Seventy Five (a reference to the artist’s age, born in 1950) there are works spanning twenty years of Haydon’s practice. Some of the works have a feeling of familiar resonance whilst others feel new and unseen. A substantial bronze Advance is a larger version of one of the first pieces he exhibited with Sanderson in 2005 - bronze with the patinaed hue of pounamu, biomorphic like a tree trunk or a ponga frond, part prow of a ship, with a hint of Richard Serra as influence.

The works Drift and Fluidity are callbacks to the forms he was creating from his first exhibition in 2006 through to 2016 when he introduced the swirling ribbon-like works with wood veneer on carbon fibre. The ribbons are present in their newest incarnation, ‘Flex’ and ‘Spring’, made from pleather and in new colours including a deep forest green.

The more monumental works featuring in the show - Current, Endurance and Travelling continue the serpentine-style of the artist’s outdoor sculptural pieces that he has been making over the last ten years. Traveling IV is a new corten steel sculpture that rises organically from its base like an elegant steel treble clef. The green pleather ribbons of the new Spring series wind through space like balletic eels. Conchord spirals like a tactile corkscrew through the air.

Haydon’s enduring exploration of movement, material, and space cements his place as a vital force in contemporary New Zealand sculpture. As Seventy Five amply demonstrates, the artist’s commitment to innovation and his poetic engagement with the world around him ensure that his sculptures remain as dynamic, engaging and relevant as ever.

- Dr Andrew Paul Wood, October 2025