Kua tae mai Te Tangata KōwhaiPeter Robinson’s Te Tangata Kōwhai is an oversized reclining figure, diagrammatically assembled from thin, uniform cuboid rods. As in many of Robinson’s recent works, this sculpture invokes the physicality of its materials to sublimate, but not obscure, a riot of implications and potential meanings about the history of figurative sculpture in increasingly politicised public spaces. Its blistering yellow colour, raised knee and protruding foot lend it an air of almost comedic sociability, an invitation to approach such spaces in a communal, discursive manner.In this same vein, Te Tangata Kōwhai can also be read as an irreverent commentary on Sol Lewitt’s seminal 1974 work Incomplete Variations of Open Cubes, the conceptual rigour of which is matched only by its po-faced seriousness. In Robinson’s hands, the methodical, logically derived cube structure is contorted into a reclining nude, a timeworn subject of figurative European art that is the antithesis of everything Lewitt’s work stands for. It may even, for some viewers, be seen as a sideways, site specific commentary on the work’s location across the street from a yellow-branded supermarket well known for their stick-figure mascot. ...
