The Hawke’s Bay Museum & Art Gallery, in association with Christchurch Art Gallery, is pleased to present the exhibition Graphica Britannica.

The Hawke’s Bay Museum & Art Gallery, in association with Christchurch Art Gallery, is pleased to present the exhibition Graphica Britannica.

Graphica Britannica brings together a selection of forty-one significant British prints spanning the first half of the twentieth century. The prints were generously gifted to Christchurch Art Gallery by Sir Rex de Charembac Nan Kivell in 1953.

The exhibition features works by major British artists including Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Eric Gill, John Nash, John Piper and Graham Sutherland.

Rex Nan Kivell (1898 – 1977) was New Zealand born. He is best known in Australasia for the important collection of art relating to New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific that he gathered over his lifetime. In 1931 Nan Kivell was appointed director of London’s Redfern Gallery, known for commissioning editioned prints by leading artists of the time. In 1953 he made a generous gift of over 1000 British prints to the four main New Zealand galleries – Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch.

“The Christchurch collection offers a diverse range of printmaking techniques, subject matter and styles covering one of the most significant periods in the history of the print in Britain,” says exhibition curator Peter Vangioni.

The exhibition has been arranged to complement Nan Kivell’s original list of prints, which he organized into four distinctive groups: lithographs, colour woodcuts, linocuts and wood engravings. In its breadth and depth the Nan Kivell collection provides a comprehensive survey of several forms of British printmaking activity between 1916 and 1953.

Graphica Britannica includes works by leading British artists of the Art Deco period, and will hold special appeal to those celebrating the 2010 Hawke’s Bay Art Deco festival.