Nigel Brown is one of New Zealand’s most significant figurative artists. His distinctive narrative style of painting is profoundly influenced by social, political and environmental concerns. From the 1980s onwards, his works have tackled issues of nuclear weapons, feminism, the peace movement, national identity and indigenous flora and fauna.

The skewed depiction of a suburban clothesline, the Hills Hoist, in this painting creates a distinctive geometric structure and divides and flattens the picture plane. This iconic everyday object has become part of a recognisable vernacular of a suburban New Zealand landscape.

Nigel Brown (born 1949, Invercargill, raised in Tauranga) graduated from Elam School of Fine Art, University of Auckland in 1971. In 1981 he was awarded a Creative New Zealand Grant for travel to the U.S., the U.K. and Western Europe. Brown has exhibited and published widely. He received the inaugural Artists to Antarctica Award in 1998, the Order of New Zealand Merit for services to painting and printmaking in 2004 and a New Zealand Embassy artist residency in Moscow in 2005. In 2009 Tauranga Art Gallery hosted a retrospective exhibition ‘The Brown Years’, celebrating his formative works. Brown lives and works in Dunedin.