TIKI to TIKI presents Dick Frizzell’s decades-long, extended series of works explicitly examining the tiki form. Frizzell brings global pop culture and the history of art into direct dialogue with Māori visual traditions, delivering works which are multi-layered and at once provocative, playful, while distinctly rooted in Aotearoa. By transposing familiar imagery into stylised hei tiki forms, Frizzell achieves many things including examining the intersections of mass media, identity, and cultural symbolism.

A defining feature of his distinctive practice is direct quotation from across art history: Frizzell frequently references specific paintings, artists, and visual styles, while reframing them through his own lens. These quotations collapse time, placing historical art movements, popular imagery, contemporary New Zealand and Māori culture into visual conversations.

Drawing on the bold simplification and high-contrast palettes associated with movements such as Modernism and Pop Art, the Tiki series reconfigures widely recognised motifs inspired by the visual languages of tiki carving. The resulting works are visually immediate yet conceptually encrusted. Frizzell’s visual dexterity and his ability to move fluently with remarkable dexterity between references, styles, and cultural registers is not simply distinctive, it is unique in New Zealand art. In this manner, he encourages viewers to consider how symbols shift in meaning as they move between cultural contexts.

First developed in the early 1990s, the Tiki series quickly became one of Frizzell’s most widely discussed bodies of work and remains one of the central tenets to his considerable reputation in New Zealand art. Featuring works from 1992 to 2026, TIKI to TIKI also includes the seminal Mickey to Tiki Tu Meke (2013) where Frizzell – directly utilising cartoon outlining techniques - morphs back and forth the faces of Mickey Mouse with key stylistics of the hei tiki.

Alongside these pop-culture interpretations and conversations, Frizzell repeatedly engages with the diverse languages and idioms of modernist painting, particularly the fractured forms and shifting viewpoints of Pablo Picasso. The outstanding, redolent, Pascoid Tiki #20 (2026) uses the compositional devices and visual energy of Cubism by combining planar abstraction with the simplified figure and becomes, in that process, distinctively Frizzell and distinctively tiki.

Together these two works demonstrate the ever-remarkable breadth of the extended series, where references to popular imagery and art history converge in an explicitly New Zealand context. Collectively and individually the works comprising TIKI to TIKI explore cultural exchange, appropriation, the shifting meanings and multiple layers of iconic imagery.

If you would like to enquire about available Dick Frizzell screenprints based on his TIKI paintings, please CONTACT US

Presented in partnership with Te Kano Estate.