Melvin Day: A Modernist Perspective
22 June to 6 October, Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato
A ground-breaking survey of works by painter Melvin Day (1923 to 2016), who was at the forefront of New Zealand’s abstraction and cubism movement and revered for his radical, experimental and prolific practice. Hamilton-born Day, who studied at Elam School of Fine Art, Victoria University and later the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, bequeathed 60 works to the Waikato Museum. The majority of paintings in the exhibition are drawn from the Day gift and include a watercolour landscape near Waiuku painted when the artist was a teenager and a large-scale oil canvas of a Fiordland scene done 70 years later. waikatomuseum.co.nz