CURATOR Greg O’Brien ORGANISER Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland OTHER VENUES Gus Fisher Gallery PUBLICATION Gregory O’Brien A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, publisher Auckland University Press
This show surveys the work of expatriate Illustrator, designer, and typographer Graham Percy. Percy was born in Stratford, in Taranaki, in 1938. He studied at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, graduating in the early 1960s. He collaborated with other artists and writers and worked as an illustrator for the School Journal. He set up one of New Zealand’s first design consultancies with Hamish Keith and designed a number of Colin McCahon's exhibition invitations. In 1964, he received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art, London. He worked in that city until his death in 2008. The show draws on his own comprehensive collection of work, and includes published drawings and private works created for family and friends. Percy's illustrations and ‘imagined histories’ depict an eclectic host of characters—a Venetian kiwi wearing a masquerade mask, Sigmund Freud in Dargaville, and Johann Strauss as a hot air balloon.
