Provenance:
Purchased from Judith Anderson Gallery, Auckland, circa 1991

Hotere's BIKO works embody the outwards looking socio-political agenda which underpinned the artist's practice throughout his entire career. Steve Biko was a South African anti-apartheid activist who, following his imprisonment and torture, died at the hands of the Afrikaner police in 1977, an event which sparked international outrage. Hotere's response to this tragic death is powerful: these works lay forth a simple, elegiac tribute in which Biko's name is boldly and spiritedly delineated. The banner form of these works necessarily calls to mind the protest sign, a point of particular relevance given Hotere's involvement in the anti-Springbok protests several years earlier.