Leapaway girl by Ian Scott

Leapaway girl, 1969, by Ian Scott.

In the 1960s Ian Scott (1945– ) was one of a handful of New Zealand artists working in a Pop Art style. His Girlie paintings, featuring scantily clad young women in landscape, shocked a conservative New Zealand art-viewing public. Scott procured most of the images of women he used in these works from advertising and magazine photographs. Colours (white against blue, used to evoke a generalised New Zealand environment and atmosphere) are so bright as to be elevated to the level of ‘hyper-reality’. Scott presents the viewer with an ideal or utopian world that is derived in part from his own surroundings and present-day reality. But this world is undermined by its obvious artificiality.

By 1976 he was exploring geometric abstraction with his Lattice series, and works like these dominated his output over the following decade. In the 1990s his New Zealand paintings and Kelliher paintings series paid homage to well-known New Zealand landscape artists by re-presenting their paintings.