About Alvin Pankhurst

Pankhurst’s paintings are realist and surrealist in style and have won him international recognition. In 2001 he was the first ever NZ resident to have work accepted into the Royal Academy of London’s Summer Exhibition.

Immediately after graduating from Wellington’s School of Design with Honours, he was a finalist in the prestigious Benson and Hedges National Art Award 1970.

Four years later he won the Benson & Hedges Award with his surrealist painting ‘Maybe Tomorrow.’ It was promptly bought by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery at a record price for a New Zealand painting.

Pankhurst was commissioned to do 16 paintings for the Fox Glacier Hotel on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand. His unconventional, sensitive vision, engages the viewer directly in a fresh appreciation of this beautiful landscape. Many of his paintings are available as prints.

In 2006 Pankhurst painted the first of his native New Zealand paintings, taking as his inspiration the beautiful carvings of the New Zealand Maori, and depicting them in typical NZ settings.

Pankhurst’s work is represented in New Zealand in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Te Papa, Anderson Park Gallery, Southland Museum, the Hoken, the Todd Motor collection and Parliament, NZ.

Alvin Pankhurst (b 1949) is married with two sons and lives in Auckland.