Gretchen Albrecht is one of New Zealand's most popular and enduring contemporary artists. This work has been published to coincide with a major retrospective of 21 years of her work at Auckland Art Gallery."

Gretchen Albrecht CNZM is one of New Zealand' s most influential painters. Over the course of her long career, her work has continued to surprise and delight, and her paintings feature in many important collections both in New Zealand and overseas. This comprehensive survey of her much-admired work reveals a painter steeped in art history, drawing freely from a range of sources to create vivid, intellectually persuasive and deeply affecting work, and determined to push her work in new directions.This revised edition includes her practice since 2019 and also interrogates her Illuminations work of the 1970s, which she revisited and re-presented in 2022. With a detailed and rich text by leading art writer Luke Smythe, plus a foreword by art curator Mary Kisler, this magnificent book both interrogates Albrecht' s work and celebrates her accomplishments.

Completely revised and updated. Chapters have been rewritten. Also added in a substantial new chapter on contemporary Maori and Pacific Island painting, as well as an acknowledgement of the coming wave of Asian artists.

Passionate, witty, and erudite, these essays by a radical curator describe how museums approach their sometimes conflicting missions to sponsor scholarship, generate popular appeal, and claim social significance. This analysis includes discussions of art and ethnology, the failure of late-Modernist art history, the construction of official culture, the intellectual history of European exploration in the Pacific, problems with cultural studies of the Pakeha Maori, and the conservation of archives and narratives.