From a Private Collection

In Wellington City Art Gallery’s seminal 1991 exhibition As Good As Gold, Billy Apple, Art Transactions, 1981-1991 you might have been excused for not noticing the work From a Private Collection, 1991 at a mere 133 x191mm in shades of grey. It would have looked vanishingly small and insignificant on the vast gallery wall against works like From the BNZ Art Collection, 1988 in its bold corporate colours at 1524 x 1067mm or the From the Fay, Richwhite Collection, 1991 on its substrate of kevlar from KZ-7’s sail at 1156 x 2502mm. Further the shades of grey in the Golden Section (61.8% and 38.2% of black) work have seemed shadow like and recessive. From the Collection works unmistakably associate the collector with the artist, Bill Apple. In a collaboration between the two, colours, substrates and subject matters are agreed; the collector is as strongly identified as the artist. But not all collectors are extroverts and want to have themselves so publicly hung upon a wall. The Private Collector needed something that spoke about them as anonymous, avoiding the glare of the spotlight, the collector whose ownership is identified only as ‘from a private collection’ when their works are loaned for a gallery exhibition. The scale of the work and the shades of grey used are fundamental to identifying this work with its private collector owner. From a Private Collection, 2018 was a collaboration between the artist and the collector in direct lineage from the 1991 work of the same title. The format was updated to reflect the artist’s current practice and the shades for background and lettering reversed. It is a particularly apt recognition of the long collaboration between the two that was both intensely private and unacknowledged by people around the artist.