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Kura Te Waru Rewiri [Thorsen]
(b Te Kao, NZ, 1950). Maori painter. Her tribal affiliation was to the Nga Puhi people. She studied at the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch, graduating in 1973 with a diploma in fine arts. She spent most of the next decade teaching, before taking up painting full-time in 1985, encouraged by two former teachers, the Maori painter Buck Nin and Rudi Gopas, a tutor at Ilam. She was also influenced by the work of de Kooning. An interest in pre-European Maori carvings gave Thorsen a rich cultural base to work from. Many of the forms in her early paintings recall forms from traditional Maori carving, but she was the first Maori painter to depict these in bright, vibrant colours. Her works link political, cultural and spiritual themes relating to Maori people and often deal with such issues as the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), Maori land rights, Christian domination and the status of Maori people as the tangata whenua or first people of Aotearoa (New Zealand). In her later works she moved away from obvious Maori imagery, replacing the hard-edged carved forms with a more abstract style. As part of this development her colours became more muted, and her themes were more personal or dealt more with spiritual rather than political concerns (e.g. Land/Women/Land, 1989; Auckland, C.A.G.). She exhibited extensively within New Zealand and internationally after her first solo show at the Pacific Gallery in Auckland in 1985.
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