artist/ Trusttum

New Zealand

Philip Trusttum (born in Raetihi on 9 June 1940) is a leading New Zealand figurative, expressionist artist. His works are usually large-scale and energetic, on un-stretched canvas.
 
Trusttum’s work has largely been inspired by everyday life experiences often worked into a semi-abstract form. His subject matter has ranged from landscapes to tennis, gardening to horses to Japanese masks and portraits. In 1984, Trusttum participated in ANZART at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and followed that with an exhibition in New York that gained a review in the NY Times.
 
He has shown in Edinburgh, New York, Hobart and Sydney; in all of New Zealand’s main centres and many smaller ones. In 2000 he became only the second New Zealand artist to be awarded the prestigious Pollock Krasner Foundation grant. His vibrant, always changing, style places him somewhat outside current fashions and has at times consigned Trusttum to the byways of New Zealand art history, a discourse formerly driven by cultural nationalism and now in thrall to opaque versions of postmodern theory that has been underwhelmed by expressive accounts of the personal.
 
 In the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours, Trusttum was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to art 
 
His work can be found in Te Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand), Auckland Art Gallery (Toi O Tamaki), Christchurch Art Gallery (Te Puna Waiwhetu),  City Art gallery Wellington, Govett Brewster, Sarjeant Gallery (Te Whare o Rehua), Dunedin Public Art Gallery, The Fletcher Trust Collection, Wallace Collection, WHMilbank Gallery