Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation

ILLUSTRATED NON-FICTION FINALIST

Mrkusich: The Art of Transformation
Alan Wright and Edward Hanfling
Auckland University Press
ISBN 9781869404376
RRP $99.99

Milan Mrkusich (b 1925) is New Zealand’s leading abstract painter. In 1949, he held his first one-man show and since then has continued to push boundaries, constantly developing new forms of expression and maintaining artistic independence in a climate often hostile to abstraction. He was made an ONZM in 1997 for his services to painting and a New Zealand Arts Icon in 2003.

Alan Wright is a painter and an Honorary Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Auckland, where until recently he was a Senior Lecturer. He is particularly interested in the theoretical foundation of modernist painting in New Zealand, especially of the 1960s and 1970s, and he is an expert on the work of our leading abstractionist painter Milan Mrkusich.

Art historian Edward Hanfling is a freelance writer, curator and critic, writing often for leading art journal Art New Zealand. He has an MA and PhD in Art History from The University of Auckland; his MA thesis topic centred on Milan Mrkusich: “Ruskin on Mrkusich: Abstraction and Interrelationship”. He has written essays or introductions for around a dozen exhibition related publications and regularly writes as an expert author for auction house catalogues.