Described as both realist and surrealist, Alvin Pankhurst has a career that has spanned some four decades. Highlights of this career include winning the prestigious Benson & Hedges Art Award in 1974 and having his work selected for the Royal Academy of London’s Summer Exhibition of 2001. Maybe Tomorrow, the surrealist, hyper-real depiction of the interior of a room in a dingy Wellington villa, is now in the collection of the Dunedin Public art Gallery. It remains, alongside works by Brent Wong, one of the strongest examples of surrealism by a New Zealand painter. International judge James W. Foster said at the time: “Maybe Tomorrow is a tour de force in its immaculate technique, exquisitely detailed composition, eerie colour and compelling sense of time and place.”

Thirty years have passed since then and Pankhurst has continued his unique vision. Shifting Sands depicts the untamed character of Auckland’s west coast. In the dunes, amidst the smelter of the sand and wind, floats an ornately carved fire surround and mantle, still remarkably intact given the conditions. This item is so bizarre in this context and it compels the viewer to muse on how it got there. What great tragedy has befallen a vessel somewhere out to sea so that this item may be carried to shore? The fantastical impossibility of the image is something that Pankhurst has returned to again and again.