Bio

Louise Henderson, DBE was born in 1902 and raised in Paris.  In 1925 she emigrated to Christchurch where she studied and taught at the Canterbury School of Art.  In 1940 she moved to Wellington and became interested in modernist concerns after seeing a number of Cubist themed paintings by John Weeks.

In 1952 Henderson returned to Paris to improve her knowledge of modern painting.  An exhibition of Henderson's vividly painted adaptations of the cubist style was held at the Auckland City Art Gallery shortly after she returned from Paris in 1953. This groundbreaking show combined with regular exhibitions over following years in both Auckland and Wellington firmly established her reputation as a modern artist of note.

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s Henderson frequently chose still-life subjects as the starting point for works. All these works contain facetted abstraction in a traditionally cubist manner but retain enough figurative structure to enable the subject to be easily recognised.

Henderson continued to be an active and seemingly inexhaustibly innovative painter well into her eighties. Her outstanding contribution to New Zealand painting was recognised in 1973 through the granting of a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council fellowship.