Private Collection, Auckland
Drawing for a Diptych - Requiem For Tony

Ralph Hotere’s Requiem Series of paintings of 1973–74 refers to the Catholic mass for the dead and his use of dark, subdued tones throughout the series imbues a sense of contemplative reflection. In this related drawing, flowing watercolour washes are overlaid with precisely executed pinstripe lines of paint creating a striking contrast between the spontaneous and the orderly.

'The densely packed rhythms of the Requiem paintings were an experiment in visual pitch - Hotere seeking the perfect harmony between interval and line. They are saturated with the memory of his mother, Ana Maria Hotere, and his friend the composer Anthony Watson. The funereal blackness of these works and their tautly stretched fragility are a keening litany of grief and loss - the Requiem as a sung mass and these images the visual equivalent of the tangi as both ceremony and sound.'

Ralph Hotere, The Artist (Ron Sang Publications 2008)