New Zealand-born Max Gimblett has spent the major part of his career in the United States, although he maintains close links with the Pacific and has regularly travelled to Asia (especially to India and Japan). Gimblett has evolved a personal symbolism that interweaves Jungian analysis with a range of religious thought and practice. His interest in Zen Buddhism, alchemy and psychoanalysis has matured over many years. He has absorbed the lessons of the abstract expressionists in New York (Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell especially) and extends their investigations into an abstract art which has spiritual and metaphysical connotations for audiences today.

Gimblett consistently blends eastern and western references in his work. Before establishing himself as a painter, he had turned to Hamada and Bernard Leach for guidance as a young potter. In San Francisco during 1965 he combined the style of David Hockney and Indian Moghal miniatures in highly detailed figurative paintings and watercolours. When his abstract vocabulary developed, he visually quoted Robert Motherwell and the Zen master Sengai Gibon as a very natural synthesis. Similarly, the distinctions between Buddhism and Christianity are irrelevant to an artist who accepts the modernist notion of duality as a guiding principle, even though the reconciliation of opposites constantly asserts itself in his imagery.

Numerous paintings using a shaped 'quatrefoil' stretcher first emerged in Gimblett's work in 1983. The work Fish 2 (Koi Sennin) is one of several large quatrefoils upon which calligraphic markings have been made with liquid pigment. On one level, these spontaneous markings stem from the artist's experience of 'sitting at the edge of the pool in front of the Kyoto National Museum of Art and watching the golden/silver/multi-mineral coloured Koi Sennin swim ... and learning what their legend and mythology is.'(1)

1. Gimblett, Max, Letter to Doug Hall, 19 April 1994.