01/08/2026
Roy Cowan, Bridge, unknown date (Aigantighe Art Gallery Acc. No. 1983.29) on display in the New Vision Gallery at the Aigantighe Art Gallery.
Exhibited in Aigantighe House, the New Vision Gallery exhibition shows artworks that are all part of the Aigantighe Art Gallery’s permanent collection. The New Vision Gallery exhibition celebrates the support given to New Zealand artists by the early dealer gallery in Auckland. One of the artists represented by New Vision Gallery was Roy Cowan (1922–2006), his lithograph on paper, Bridge, is featured above.
Roy Cowan MBE CNZM (Ngāpuhi, Te Āti Awa) was an artist who moved with assurance between producing ceramics, printmaking and illustration, working across the porous boundary between craft and modernism. Born in Wellington, Cowan trained as a teacher at Wellington Teachers’ College in 1939, where he specialised in art, and then he later studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London after receiving the Association of Art Societies Scholarship in 1953. At the Slade School of Fine Art he developed a sustained commitment to lithography and pottery.
From 1959 Roy Cowan worked as a full-time artist, exhibiting regularly with his partner, another artist Juliet Peter, and some of these exhibitions were at New Vision Gallery in Auckland.
Cowan’s practice explored dualities – for example, nature and technology, interior and exterior, monumentality and intimacy – and the artist worked to resolve visual tensions between these dualities through clarity of form. In Bridge we can see that the Cowan has juxtaposed a depiction of people balancing on the structure of a bridge that sits above fast flowing turbulent waters – the stationary angular form of the bridge creates a pleasant contrast with the swift swirling waters below.
New Vision Gallery is on display at the Aigantighe Art Gallery until 9 August 2026.
