Tony Fomison

Anthony Leslie "Tony" Fomison was born on 12 July 1939 in Christchurch, New Zealand, and attended Linwood High School there. He went on to study sculpture, life drawing, and fine arts at the University of Canterbury's School of Fine Arts at Ilam, under the painter Rudi Gopas, completing a diploma over roughly three to four years ending around 1960. His first solo exhibition was held at Several Arts in Christchurch in the early 1960s.

In 1963 he received an Arts Advisory Board grant that funded roughly three years of travel and study in England and continental Europe, with sources variously noting time in Italy and Spain, where he studied Old Master painting technique firsthand in museums and churches. He returned to New Zealand and developed a mature practice built from dense, glazed oil layers, drawing on personal mythology, biblical and classical imagery, and Pacific and Maori source material, developed alongside close relationships within Auckland's Maori and Pacific communities. In 1985 he became the inaugural recipient of the Rita Angus Residency in Wellington, reportedly intending to use it to deepen his engagement with the local Samoan community.

Fomison's work was the subject of a major touring survey organized by the Dowse Art Gallery in 1979, "A Survey of His Painting and Drawing 1961 to 79," which also traveled to Christchurch Art Gallery. He died on 7 February 1990, at age 50, after collapsing at Waitangi during the 150th anniversary commemorations of the Treaty of Waitangi; he was taken to Whangarei Hospital in Northland, where he died that day. This account, from Christchurch Art Gallery, the New Zealand On Screen archive, and Mark Forman's biography, is the version supported by the majority of institutional and narrative sources. One museum database, Te Papa Tongarewa, records a differing date of 6 February and a place of death of Auckland; this is treated here as a minority, unreconciled record. A second major touring survey, "Fomison: What Shall We Tell Them?", opened at City Gallery Wellington in 1994, four years after his death.

New Zealand critics and curators consistently place Fomison among the country's most significant painters. The writer Garth Cartwright has called him "one of New Zealand's finest painters," and institutional writing frames him as a central, if sometimes contested, figure in postwar New Zealand art. Christchurch Art Gallery's account of the posthumous 1994 survey, "Fomison: What Shall We Tell Them?", describes his work as having drawn sharply divided readings over the years, from dismissive to deeply serious, a divide that continues to shape writing about him. His paintings are frequently discussed in terms of an outsider sensibility, personal mythology, and a technical debt to European Old Masters absorbed during his early 1960s travels.

Fomison's auction market is small in volume but has risen sharply in recent years. His current auction high is for "The Fugitive" (1982 to 1983), sold at Webb's in Auckland on 18 September 2022. Reporting on the sale differs on the exact price: Webb's and subsequent press coverage cite approximately NZD 1.86 million, while the Australian Art Sales Digest database records NZD 1,623,918 for the same lot. Either figure supersedes his prior records, both set in 2020 at Webb's: "Garden of Eden Aotearoa" at NZD 516,000 and "The Watcher on the Shore" at NZD 480,500. No current commercial gallery or estate representation has been identified; his work is traded almost entirely through New Zealand auction houses, chiefly Webb's, Art+Object, International Art Centre, and Dunbar Sloane.

Fomison's market is thin by international standards, with only a small number of seven figure (NZD) results, so a single new sale can move the record substantially, as happened between 2020 and 2022. There is no catalogue raisonne and no confirmed gallery or estate representation, which places extra weight on institutional provenance, exhibition history, and the established New Zealand auction houses when assessing a work. Collectors should also be aware that even his most recent record sale is reported at two different price figures in reliable sources, a reminder to confirm hammer price versus total price, and currency, directly with the saleroom before relying on any single published number.