„When I encountered Colin McCahon’s work I realized that whole chapters of twentieth century art history would have to be rewritten."
 
TOI, TOI, TOI:
Three Generations of New Zealand Artists

Museum Fridericianum Kassel:  23 January - 5 March 1999
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki:   21 May - 8 August 1999

With works by: Colin McCahon, Rosalie Gascoigne, Len Lye, Billy Apple, Bill Culbert, Ralph Hotere, L. Budd et al., Boyd Webb, Jacqueline Fraser, Ronnie van Hout, Lisa Reihana, Peter Robinson, Mike Stenvenson, Yuk King Tan.

„Toi" is the Maori word for „art"; „Toi, Toi, Toi", meaning in German „Good luck", is the title of an exhibition being shown by the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, which gives an insight into New Zealand art of the last 50 years. This is the first time that a representative cross-section of this relatively unknown but lively and innovative art scene is being presented in Europe.

The exhibition begins chronologically with the painter Colin McCahon (*1919, †1987), whose early landscapes and pictures with religious subjects contained words, written comments and comic-like speech-bubbles as early as the forties and fifties; in the sixties, he began creating pictures which consist purely of texts and numbers, some of them of gigantic proportions.

Rosalie Gascoigne (*1917), two years older than McCahon, constructs picture-objects which consist entirely of found materials and are meditations on entropy and the tendency of nature towards disorder. The exhibition also contains photographic and cinematographic experiments from the thirties by Len Lye (*1901, †1980), who is known in Europe as a kinetic sculptor.

The intermediate generation of artists is represented by Billy Apple (*1935), Bill Culbert (*1935), Ralph Hotere (*1931), L. Budd et al. (*1953), and Boyd Webb (*1947), who is probably the New Zealand artist best known in Europe. The exhibition shows not only works from private and public collections, but also works created especially for Kassel--a case in point is the cooperation of the painter Ralph Hotere and the „light-artist" Bill Culbert on an installation project.

The use of the most varied media is carried forward in the younger generation in works by Jacqueline Fraser (*1956), Lisa Reihana (*1964), Peter Robinson (*1965), Mike Stevenson (*1964), Yuk King Tan (*1966) and Ronnie van Hout (*1962). Lisa Reihana’s video installations, Mike Stevenson’s „Player Piano", Ronnie van Hout’s plastic models or Yuk King Tan’s firework drawings are only some of the examples of the use of varied media which reflect the interest of young artists in the phenomena of mass culture and interfaces between different modes of cultural expression.
  
The exhibition shows vividly how successfully Maori artists of the youngest generation have integrated in the New Zealand art scene and in so doing underlines the importance of McCahon as a figure representing integration for artists of both Maori and European origin.

The exhibition of New Zealand contemporary art--the most comprehensive and extensive that Europe has ever seen --promises to show some of the last great discoveries of the century.