Trevor Pye
We know artists...
With a range of works from many of New Zealand's most impressive, emerging and established artists, we are privileged to be able to bring you the best contemporary art New Zealand has to offer. Click on an artist's name to see examples of their work.
Looking for an artist?
Click and select artist.
Trevor Pye was born in Te Awamutu in 1952 and educated in Australia, attending the North Adelaide School of Art before completing his Bachelor of Arts in 1985 at the South Australian College of Advanced Education in Adelaide. Pye later returned to New Zealand, completing his Masters of Fine Art with First Class Honours at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Arts in 1996.
Throughout his career, Pye's work has been largely motivated by a desire to examine the human relationship with the natural world. Whether in his earlier sculpture or through his collage, drawing and painting, Pye has consistently employed a fluid and organic style to present thecomplexities of this relationship and to suggest certain perspectives on our place in the world.
As his career has progressed, Pye's work has undergone several phases: from convoluted re-presentations of the landscape rendered in a highly resonant palette to darker, more segmented worlds brimming with collage elements and art-historical referents to metaphorical landscapes populated with a hybrid mix of abstract and representational imagery that exploresthe 'constructed' world of human relationships.
Pye was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Grant in 1988 and 1996 and has held numerous solo shows and consistently participated in group shows throughout his long and varied career.Pye is also highly regarded for his illustrations, which have graced the pages of over 200 locally and internationally published children's books and for which he has received New Zealand and UNESCO book awards. Pye has taught a new generation of artists as alecturer at the Auckland University of Technology School of Art & Design and continues to produce and exhibit work from hishome studio in Otaki.