Dick Frizzell’s Hastings & Studio International Revisited In Wellington

Wednesday, 4 June 2025, 1:18 pm
Opinion: howard davis

“International Modernism hit ILAM like a meteorite in 1961, and I was directly in the path of it ... We suspected that something bigger was going on in the world thanks to ancient copies of the 'studio international' magazine but could never grasp the whole picture, such was the communication hole we seemed to be stuck in.” - Dick Frizzell.

“Everywhere and everyone other than our national museum seems to have noticed Dick Frizzell and his singular contribution to the art of Aotearoa. C’mon Te Papa - give Dick the retrospective he deserves!”- Mark Stocker, art historian and collaborator with / friend of the artist.

Full Disclaimer: This article contains revised and updated material previously published in SCOOP in Feb 2017 to plug not only the recent publication of Frizzell’s charming, frothy, and fascinating memoir, Hastings, A Boy’s Own Adventure, but also his latest show at Wellington’s Page Gallery which runs until June 14.

With a range of works dating from the 1990s through to the present, Dick Frizzell’s current exhibition at Wellington’s Page Gallery, studio international, includes a number of his archetypal homages to great twentieth-century artists such as sculptor Alexander Calder, painter and sculptor Fernand Léger, painter Juan Gris, and sculptor Jean Tinguely. It’s as though he’s revisited their ‘Greatest Hits’ and recorded a number of quirky and intriguing ‘cover’ versions, some of which are fairly rough copies, while others play mischievously with the originals. All, however, are quite charming and beautifully framed.

The show takes its title from the international art magazine founded in London in 1964, the lavishly illustrated pages of which offered young and hungry artists in Aotearoa a rare insight into what was happening in the rest of the world - including the young Frizzell, who was studying at the University of Canterbury at the time and recalled its influence on his early artistic evolution -

“International Modernism hit ILAM like a meteorite in 1961, and I was directly in the path of it. This major extinction event happened in my first year, in the middle of a tepid diet of polite early British Modernism hedged with a touch of Synthetic cubism. Ben Nicholson, Ivon Hitchens, Paul Nash, William Scott … all great and I love them … but where were Peter Blake, Edward Ruscha, Jasper Johns? These guys were all warming up their primary colours while we were still stuck in the tertiaries!

We suspected that something bigger was going on in the world thanks to ancient copies of the Studio International magazine but could never grasp the whole picture such was the communication hole we seemed to be stuck in.

Then it was our turn to host the Universities Arts Festival. ELAM sent down a crate of paintings as their contribution to the Exhibition.

And here’s the meteorite: I was half-heartedly scumbling away with my neutral halftones when Murray Grimsdale burst into the studio and said, ‘Come and have a look at this!’ I followed him down the corridor to the sculpture department where they were crowbarring open a large crate by the loading bay. The first painting to be partially revealed … the one that got Murray in such a lather … was a large composition of what looked like a slice through a hardboiled egg. Concentric ellipses of high-keyed oranges, yellows and red. We couldn’t believe it! They were teaching this at an art school? At Elam?

The artist was John Perry and the teacher was Robert Ellis, brought out from England to teach design, but ‘secretly’ spreading the Mid 20th century gospel to any student hip enough to dig it. And that was pretty much it … a new world opened … and I visit it as often as I can!”

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Now recognised as one of the most influential and celebrated contemporary Pop artists in Aotearoa, Dick Frizzell (Tāmaki Makaurau) has often slipped like an eel through the nets of traditional critical definition. His popular appeal and commercial success, however, may well be due precisely to the dramatic swerves and diversions he has made between different styles and genres.

His work is characterised by a highly skilled handling of paint and an endlessly inventive range of subject matter and styles, ranging from faux-naive New Zealand landscapes, figurative still-life, comic book characters, and witty parodies of modernist abstraction. Never content with adhering to any one particular style, his taste is conveniently broad and he has a penchant for fondly remembered and well-worn clichés. His work possesses a sense of exuberance, irony, and nostalgia that subverts traditional hierarchies of 'high' and 'low' art and pokes fun at the existential angst of much New Zealand painting in the art culture of his youth.

Born in Auckland in 1943, Frizzell trained at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury from 1960-63, studying under Rudi Gopas and Russell Clark. Like Warhol, he went on to work in advertising for several years, where he gained a deep appreciation for the characters he later incorporated into his art work, before becoming a full-time painter in 1995. His commercial work taught him all about how to blur categories with his later paintings often appearing as a pastiche of images drawing on modern art and graphic design.

Many of Frizzell’s prints and paintings are inspired by comic books, advertising trademarks, Maori iconography, and rural road signs, addressing issues around cultural (mis)appropriation, bicultural cross-fertilisation, art as design, and the politicisation of New Zealand art. Given the rapid and complex social changes that have occurred in New Zealand over the last thirty years, questions about Kiwi cultural identity are highly relevant to his work and Frizzell has eagerly investigates and reflects on them, underscoring his commitment not only to exploring a genuinely antipodean Pop sensibility, but also its commercial potential.

Like Lichtenstein, Frizell consciously adopts unfashionable styles of painting and some of his best-known work plays with the 'Four Square Man,' an advertising character for the Four Square grocery chain. He is most notorious for his appropriation of kitsch Kiwiana icons, which he often incorporates into cartoon-like paintings and lithographs, which got him into trouble over the lithograph Mickey to Tiki which portrayed a cartoon Mickey Mouse evolving in stages into a Tiki and became a best-selling print and popular T-shirt. The major retrospective Dick Frizzell: Portrait of a Serious Artiste of 1997 also attracted some controversy over Grocer with Moko (1992), which offended some viewers by depicting the Four Square man with facial moko.

Frizzell has licensed designs to the Esther Diamond linen company, released a number of varieties of Frizzell Wines, and designed the cover and several illustrations for The Great New Zealand Songbook (2009). In the same year, he published the eponymously titled Dick Frizzell: The Painter, with a foreword by Hamish Keith, and in 2012 completed a series of paintings relating to poems by Sam Hunt. At their opening exhibition, Frizzell said that he and Hunt had committed the "ultimate sin of being understood" in their respective media.

Elizabeth Caughey and John Gow described his approach in Contemporary New Zealand Art 2 - “It was while working in the environment of commercial advertising that Frizzell began to pluck familiar objects from their usual context and turn them into arresting images. Several products that were ‘household’ names to New Zealanders in the late 1970’s became icons in Frizzell’s hands. From sources as varied as canned fish wrappers, corner shop signage and junk mail, he turned images into paintings, giving titles that introduced unexpected associations.”

Michael Dunn, in his Contemporary Painting in New Zealand, noted that Frizzell’s work often exhibits “an eclectic quality, brought about by the variety of styles he has borrowed, pastiched or commented on in his art. In much of his imagery, no line is drawn between low art sources such as comic book illustrations or packaging and the high art references with which his painting is freely sprinkled.”

Not all of Frizzell's reviews have been as adulatory. In relation to his Rugby World Cup-related work, (including the T-shirts), art commentator Janet McAllister accused him of being a paid cheerleader and labelled him an adman - "While Frizzell's work in the past could be interpreted as ironic commentary on cultural ownership, his RWC range includes a tiki made out of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union logo … In Frizzell's earlier work, Mickey to Tiki tu Meke, Mickey Mouse's face morphed into a tiki. It turns out this was less a questioning of (mis)appropriation and more a blueprint for advertising. Just change Mickey to the NZRFU logo and voila!" - while Metro magazine asked its readers whether there is anything he won't "whore" himself out to.

In an October 2011 interview for The NZ Herald, Greg Dixon provided a more nuanced assessment of Frizell’s achievements - "Alone among his contemporaries, Frizzell has turned himself into a multimedia business, the output of which - whether it's on canvas or an Esther Diamond cushion or a T-shirt or a wine bottle - is almost incidental to the creator's signature. A Frizzell is a Frizzell whether you hang it on the wall, pour it into a glass or wear it on your body. However, the central fact of Frizzell Inc is this: it's about the image, both the ones he creates with paint and ink and the one the man in the corduroy suit has created for himself. And both would seem to be the product of a puckish (and possibly contrary) mind that has been shaped by an atypical artist's life."

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Frizzell is represented in many public collections, including Christchurch Art Gallery, The Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, and Te Papa. His prints and paintings are held in many public, corporate, and private collections throughout New Zealand, and major commissions include works for Sky City Casino and painting an Ansett New Zealand aeroplane for Starship Children's Hospital. He was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the arts in 2004.

Exhibition highlights include the major travelling retrospective Dick Frizzell: Portrait of a Serious Artiste (1997) and a residency in Antarctica as part of the Invitational Artist Programme (2005).

He has also published numerous books including the monograph Dick Frizzell: The Painter (2009); It’s All About the Image (2011); and Me, According to the History of Art (2020); and Hastings, A Boy’s Own Adventure, A Memoir (2025).

© Scoop Media

Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz