HUNDERTWASSER IN NEW ZEALAND
The Bay of Islands with its hundred islands, Kaurinui Creek. He who goes ashore here lands in another world: Evergreen mangrove forests, which in the tidal mud form bizarre figures. Filigreed lichen and mossy beards round the branches, jungle with the never ending line of liana, giant fern and 1000-year-old Kauri spruce, huge Puriri tree, which needs seven men to embrace it. The splendour of tropical palms, the red blossoming Pohutukawa tree.
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It is the unity of nature and art, art and life, which Friedensreich Hundertwasser has always been searching for, never was he nearer to this unity than in New Zealand.
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Here in New Zealand, Hundertwasser is really that, what he always wanted to be: A magician, who fills a painting with magic vegetation, like filling a glass with water until it is full.
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It is here that Hundertwasser has settled, in valleys, on rivers in primeval forests, so extensive and impassable, that you need three days to walk around Hundertwasserland. Hundertwasser lives in the Kaurinui valley as though in a landscape painting with trees, which he has planted, not painted, with a Böcklin-pond, which he has dammed up himself, with valleys named after Brueghel, Klimt, Schiele and Sonnenstern. He has also named valleys after his mother Elsa and his painter friend Brô. Here he lives by himself in a lonely settler’s hut, preferably in the winter months, when it is summer in Europe and it is cold in New Zealand and rains a lot.
Hundertwasser, who long before the existence of the ecological movement was an advocate of the green party, has planted thousands of trees in New Zealand, not in order to produce timber, but to improve the soil, the water, the air, the soul and for the sake of beauty.
Written by Hundertwasser for the book Ao Tea Roa, 1979.
Published in:
Brockstedt, Hans (ed.), Ao Tea Roa – Isle of Lost Desire, Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 1979