From 12 March 2025
Fresh from the studio and in advance of his upcoming exhibition…
We have the pleasure of sharing three of the exceptional new paintings Martin Ball has been working on in the studio over the past year. We are presenting these in advance of his forthcoming exhibition (entitled Homage II) which will open on 12 April.
Rita Rita 2023 - 2024 H 1600mm x W 1200mm Oil on linen
In the above painting, Rita Rita, Martin Ball pays homage to fellow portraitist, Rita Angus. He has drawn on a small photograph of Angus (a copy of which is visible on the studio wall) as she works on what would become her most iconic self-portrait. Because the photograph, taken by the artist's friend, Jean Bertram in 1937, is black and white, Ball has had to invent a colour scheme for the work, choosing a cool, modernist palette. He has also chosen to soften the edges and surfaces - in strong contrast to Angus' hard-edge realism - to create a very different sense of the artist's mood.
Study: After Reynolds 2025 H 1000mm x W 800mm Oil on canvas
Study: After Reynolds, is based on a reproduction of Joshua Reynolds' study, Portrait of a Young Man, which resides in the collection of the British Museum. Unusual for the period (1770s), the portrait depicts an unidentified young man of colour, posed nobly, not unlike Reynolds' famous work, Portrait of Mai (Omai) purchased jointly by the National Portrait Gallery and the Getty Museum in 2023. Again, Ball has deliberately reinterpreted the portrait, softening and blurring the features, changing the background of turbulent, stormy skies to something mistier and moe summery.
The Fifer 2024 H 1600 x W 1200mm Oil on linen
The third work in this suite is an homage to Edouard Manet's The Fifer, or The Young Flautist, (1866). Like Manet, himself, Ball was deeply inspired by the work of Diego Velazquez in the Prado. His last collection of homage works featured characters from Velazquez's magnum opus Las Meninas. As in the other works, Ball has worked from a small printed reproduction (also just visible on the studio wall). While it remains faithful to the original's clear, rich colours and forms, he has chosen to include the tapes that fix the work to his studio wall, rendered in near-perfect 3 dimensional reality, to remind us of its origins.
To inquire about these works, and to find out more about Martin Ball’s forthcoming exhibition, Homage II, contact us here
An excellent article about Martin Ball’s recent work, ‘Memory and Influence: Martin Ball’s Homage to the Past’, written by art historian Richard Wolfe features in Art New Zealand, No 193 Autumn 2025.