Ten Big Paintings
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Ten Big Paintings was a 1971 art exhibition developed by the Auckland City Art Gallery (now known as Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) which toured throughout New Zealand.[1]
In May 1969, in anticipation of the opening of the new Edmiston Wing[2] at the Auckland Art Gallery, Hamish Keith and the staff developed the concept for an exhibition of large paintings on canvas.[3] Ten Big Paintings was commissioned by Keith who was the gallery's Keeper of Collections.[4] There was a recognition at the time that the scale of painting in New Zealand was small compared to contemporary painting overseas. The Museum of Modern Art had an exhibition Large-scale Modern Painting devoted to the idea as far back as 1947.[5] Keith had been impressed by Colin McCahon painting the large-scale Northland Panels on his return from a visit to the United States in 1958.[6] The painter Ross Ritchie, who was also working at the gallery, had experience of painting billboards and was familiar with the established size for these works as being 10 x 20 feet (3.1 x 6.1 meters).[7] This then was the size selected for the five part stretcher mounted canvases that were sent out to the artists and, as the gallery director Gill Docking noted in the catalogue introduction, ‘Each painter was left with complete autonomy over their work but was given a chance to do something which, under normal circumstances, could be uneconomic.’[8] The exhibition was opened at the Auckland Art Gallery by Princess Alexandra on the 9 February[9] and ran to 28 March after which it toured to Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. The paintings were literally too big for the National Art Gallery in Wellington and were shown next door at the Academy of Fine Arts[10] and too large also for the Robert McDougall Art Gallery where part of the exhibition was shown at the Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery.[11]