Artist Max Gimblett is giving key works representing 40 years of his career to Auckland Art Gallery.
He and wife Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will give 51 works to the Auckland Art Gallery Foundation. Today's ceremony will be in support of the gallery's development project.
Gimblett may not be a household name but his early abstractions contributed to the development of New Zealand painting. His quatrefoil-shaped paintings from the early 1980s feature in many public collections in New Zealand.
Next January, his work will be included in the biggest exhibition staged at New York's Guggenheim Museum - on American Art and the East.
Gimblett, 72, has been based in New York since 1972. He still works at least five days a week and teaches classes whenever he can.
"It's a feeling of giving back because I've been given so much by New Zealand."
He says New Zealand has always fully supported him.
"It's collected my art extremely well, it's given me exhibitions all the way from 1977, when I made contact with New Zealand as a professional artist."
The exhibition of his work at the Guggenheim in New York is likely to give him wider recognition.
He was selected by the senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim from hundreds of American artists affected by Asia.
Gimblett is working on a range of book projects with international writers and has exhibitions opening, including in Wellington and Nelson.
He is also interested in poetry and writing and his next book is with New Zealand poet Alan Loney.
-NZPA
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