Pat Hanly: The Seven Ages of Man

20 January – 20 February 2011
Opening preview: 5.30pm Wednesday 19 January

SOFA Gallery, The Arts Centre, Christchurch

SOFA Gallery is pleased to host this exhibition of Pat Hanly’s paintings. The exhibition has been curated by Andrew Clifford and focuses on seven paintings, titled The Seven Ages of Man, which were commissioned from Pat Hanly (1932–2004) by Hamish Keith for the then-new Medical School ‘Link’ Building at The University of Auckland, where they have been on permanent display since 1975. They have never before been exhibited publicly or seen together but are now brought together while major refurbishments take place on the Grafton Campus.

In retrospect, the Seven Ages of Man series occupies an interesting place in Hanly’s oeuvre, at the mid-point of a decade in which he also completed a number of major commissions, including murals for the Christchurch Town Hall (1971) and the Auckland International Airport (1977). Philosophically, Hanly started the 1970s with the Gauguin-esque Who Am I?/I Am/Do it works, beginning a period of internal exploration of evolutionary states, most notably in The Seven Ages of Man. The decade culminated with his utopian Golden Age series, but soon took a darker tone in 1981 with The End of the Golden Age,produced in response to the discord caused by the Springbok tour. Hanly studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art and from 1963 he taught drawing at The University of Auckland School of Architecture, where another mural was commissioned in 1982. He retired his lectureship in 1992 and also stopped painting soon after.

‘Pat Hanly: The Seven Ages of Man’ is toured by The University of Auckland’s Gus Fisher Gallery.

Reproduced with the kind permission of SOFA Gallery, Christchurch