Waikato landscape artist Margot Philips to be celebrated with exhibition at Hamilton museum

Margot Philips' 'The Nearby Hill' (1975), on loan from the Chartwell Collection at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, is one of the paintings which will be exhibited at Waikato Museum.

One of Waikato’s most distinctive artists, the late landscape artist Margot Philips, will be honoured with a special exhibition at Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato next week.

Philips, a Jewish painter, was born in 1902 in Germany and found refuge from the Nazis in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1938. She lived in Hamilton for more than 50 years and rose to fame as an artist during the 1960s and 1970s.

Developed by Waikato Museum curator Dr Nadia Gush, the exhibition, Of This Place: Margot Philips’ Landscapes, will showcase works from the museum’s collection, alongside paintings on loan from Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, the Chartwell Collection and the Fletcher Trust Collection.

Gush says: “This survey exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see the breadth of an exceptional Waikato artist’s career, and through her works, to experience this place which she came to call home.”

“It gives a point of entry into the life of a 20th-century migrant, a modern independent woman, a Jewish person in exile and an Aotearoa New Zealand painter. Her works present a landscape inseparable from these experiences, combining to mark her perspective as tangata Tiriti.”

Through lush Waikato farmland and parched South Island hills, Philips found a way to express her distinctive post-war vision despite not having any formal art training.

When she first arrived in Hamilton, Phillips worked for her brother Kurt at the city’s first restaurant, the Vienna Cafe, and she wouldn’t start experimenting with painting until she was in her 50s.

By the early 1960s, Phillips had attended nine summer schools under the guidance of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon, who became a life-long champion of her work.

Waikato landscape artist Margot Philips.

In fact, the upcoming exhibition will include Philips’ 1962 oil painting Landscape with Blue-Green Bach, which McCahon acquired for his personal collection.

Despite Philips’ standing in the national art scene, Hamiltonians were often challenged by her landscapes at the time. Her contemporary experimentation and distinctive use of colour were a confronting contrast to the expressive realism that was popular at the time.

However, for many, she became the artist who best expresses the character of the Waikato landscape, with its rich, leafy green tones and the rolling rhythmic waves of its hills and valleys.

Philips once said she came to the realisation that something inside her was destroyed when she settled in the Waikato.

“I needed something within me to build up again. I was terribly excited by the Waikato landscape, once I was really ready to look,” Philips said.

During her lifetime, she held four solo exhibitions in significant regional galleries, as well as numerous group shows. She died in 1988 aged 86.

Museum and Arts director Liz Cotton describes Philips as one of Waikato’s “most distinctive” artists.

“We are proud to be highlighting her work and showcasing these evocative landscape paintings which reflect our country’s landscape through a unique modernist perspective.”

The retrospective Of This Place: Margot Philips’ Landscapes runs from next Friday, May 12 until September 17. It is open daily from 10am to 5pm. Free entry.

The Details

What: Of This Place: Margot Philips’ Landscapes, art exhibition

When: From May 12 to September 17, open daily from 10am to 5pm

Where: Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato in Hamilton

Tickets: Entry is free