Philippa Blair
Born in Christchurch in 1945, Philippa Blair studied, taught and exhibited extensively; art imbued her life. She graduated from the Ilam School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University and by the 1970s was exhibiting widely across New Zealand and Australia, while also welcoming her daughters, Alice (1970) and Taisha (1972). She received Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grants in 1980 and 1984, and that same year became the first New Zealander to participate in the artist-in-residence programme at the Canberra School of Art. Returning to her hometown of Christchurch in 1985, she took up a position as a visiting lecturer at the Ilam School of Fine Arts, where she began exploring lithography with Marian Maguire. Her major exhibition A Tree Has its Heart in its Roots was shown at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in 1986. By the late 1980s she had extended further afield, with solo shows in New York City. In 1987, the Fisher Gallery in Pakuranga (now Te Tuhi) presented shelters, cloaks, tents, books, windows and other constructed canvases, marking a pivotal moment in her career. In the following years, she was awarded two Air New Zealand travel funds that enabled her to visit the United States and Italy. Major exhibitions followed, including Three from New Zealand: Philippa Blair, Christine Hellyar, Ralph Hotere at the Long Beach Museum of Art, California (1990), and a Survey Exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Hamilton (1992). Between 1993 and 1994, Blair taught painting at the Elam School of Fine Arts before relocating to Los Angeles in 1995, where she lived and worked with her husband John for nearly two decades, returning to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 2014. Since then, amongst her many exhibitions, were six significant solo shows at PG Gallery192: Crossings (2015), Drawn to Paint (2016), Dancing off Score (2018), Out of the Loop (2019), Molecular (2022), and Afloat (2024). In 2020, Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery in Auckland presented Down Under Cover, a major survey curated by Chloé Geoghegan.
Philippa Blair’s work is held in Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, University of Auckland, The Chartwell Trust Collection, Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Art Gallery, Suter Art Gallery, Nelson; Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; National Art Gallery, Canberra, Australia; Long Beach Museum and Riverside Art Museum, Los Angeles; Citibank Collection, New York; Citicorp Collection, New York; General Electric Co. Collection, New York; British Museum, London, UK; Chan Liu Museum, TaoYuan, Taiwan; David Bowie Collection, Great Britain and Switzerland, and numerous private collections.
Philippa Blair worked primarily as a painter but also made drawings, assemblages and prints. Her works are expressive and semi-abstract, reflecting urban reality and the natural world with references to high tech and organic imagery, cartographic mapping, music and film.
Exhibitions:
2025 – Philippa Blair (1945-2025) – Constant Weave
2024 – Afloat
2022 – Molecular
2020 – Seeing what’s there (group show)
2019 – Out of the Loop
2018 – Dancing off Score
2016 – Drawn to Paint
2016 – Last Judgement (group show)
2015 – Crossings
For more about Philippa Blair:
www.philippablair.com
Wikipedia
