Leo Bensemann & Friends: Portraiture and the Group Digital Exhibition Catalogue

A free digital copy of the catalogue for the 2016/7 exhibition .

Bensemann is at the heart of the exhibition, because of all these painters, who knew each other well and belonged to the same social networks, he favoured portraiture above all else.

The portraits in this exhibition were all created by the Christchurch-based artists known as The Group, in the middle decades of last century. The extraordinary flowering of talent now being called Bloomsbury South included playwrights, poets and a composer, Douglas Lilburn, as well as the artists of The Group. 

Collectively they re-invented the art of portraiture for their time and place, and provided images of their contemporaries which are vividly alive and still speak eloquently to us living in another century.