Gathered Voices - Highlights from the Fletcher Trust

Gathered Voices
Highlights from the Fletcher Trust Collection

The Fletcher Trust Collection was founded in 1962 as the corporate art collection for Fletcher Holdings. Today, it is one of the country’s most prestigious private art collections. Placing an emphasis on painting, it aims to celebrate the richness of Aotearoa artmaking. Works both new and old continue to be added.

The collection is perhaps best known for its landscapes and works of formal abstraction, but portraits and other figure-based pictures form a lively core, exuding countless stories. Gathered Voices showcases some especially fine examples dating from the nineteenth century to the present day, and reflecting a range of perspectives.

The pieces on display express important themes running through many of the figure-based works in the Fletcher Trust Collection: family, place, culture, identity, ethics.

The arrangement of pictures is neither linear nor strictly thematic. Visitors are invited to consider different points of connection, to construct their own narratives. Furthermore, when works are gathered together by different curators, new conversations emerge. Meanings develop that are often unexpected and unexpectedly rewarding.

Curated by Francis McWhannell, Curator of the Fletcher Trust Collection

Developed in collaboration with the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata

Image (detail): Michael Smither
(born 1939, Pākehā)
Interior with Child
1971
Oil on board
Fletcher Trust Collection