Ian Scott (1945-2013) was a New Zealand artist who over the course of a fifty-year career, consistently pushed the boundaries of New Zealand art. Scott began his career as a landscape painter, but by the 1960s his paintings had evolved from the hard-edge realism predominant in New Zealand, with a layering of critique, conceptualism, and pop art, that brought a much-needed internationalism to the local scene.
By the early 1970s Scott had moved away from representational painting entirely, developing the Lattice series which brought together European and American modernism from artists such as Van Doesburg, Mondrian, and Kenneth Noland, with traditions of weaving, patterns used by craftsmen, and the vernacular environment Scott found himself in, as a young immigrant to New Zealand living in a new suburb of west Auckland.
In 1975 Scott began his Lattice series, a mode that would dominate his output from that time until the 1990s, and one which he would frequently return to over the course of his career, especially during the last years of his life. The rules of the Lattice system were flexible, with many variations produced across Scott’s engagement with the motif, but the archetypal Lattice painting sees diagonal bands of colour interlaced across a square canvas.
This online presentation brings together a small selection of paintings, highlighting the variation evident in the Lattice series, spanning three decades of Scott’s practice.