Through the darkness and the light, delve into the story of one of New Zealand’s most influential twentieth-century artists.

‘As a boy Tony had drawn maps and diagrams and medieval battle scenes. He’d read fairy tales and been enchanted by local sites of Māori history. As a young man he was a vagrant on the streets of Paris, was twice imprisoned, spent time in a mental hospital, battled destructive addictions, and experienced unrequited love and loneliness. All of this would become the underworld of his art, the subterranean realm where he could dwell so as to create work that expressed something of the human condition. But it was always far wider than just his own story. Endlessly curious about Pacific and Māori history and art, and enchanted by European Renaissance art, he wanted to find a new visual language for what it meant to live in the Pacific; he wanted to make room at the back of our heads.’
— From the introduction by the author

In a career spanning three decades, Tony Fomison (1939–1990) produced some of New Zealand’s most artistically and culturally significant paintings and drawings, the backdrop of which was a life – inseparable from his art – of enduring intrigue.

A man of multitudes and a self-perceived outsider, Fomison was a son, sibling and lover; activist, archaeologist and scholar; trickster, addict and disrupter; and – above all else – an artist who shed light on the human condition and reimagined life in Aotearoa.

In this compelling biography, developed over more than a decade, Mark Forman draws on archival material and interviews with more than 150 people including Fomison’s family and close friends, leading contemporary artists, political activists, and art professionals. The result is a comprehensive yet lively and accessible biography that reveals the man and his art to a new generation of readers.

Author

Mark Forman is a writer based in Onehunga, Auckland. His doctoral thesis formed the basis of his first book, a scholarly work published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press. Forman’s personal interests in New Zealand contemporary art, biography and social history were the drivers for this project, for which he has been awarded a Whiria Te Mahara New Zealand History Grant, the 2024 Marti and Gerrard Friedlander Charitable Trust publishing grant, and a runner-up placement in the CLNZ / NZSA Writers’ Award.

Endorsements

‘This account of Tony Fomison, the first full one to be published, is both timely and balanced. Fomison died thirty-four years ago after an intense and conflicted life as person and artist, whose art took on some of the dark and difficult ghosts in our history. Mark Forman has laid out the detail of that life in a well-researched account, without passing judgement on its flaws or exaggerating its virtues. This has resulted in a valuable record of a gifted artist who worked through an important phase in our growing as a culture.’
— Denys Trussell, biographer, poet and friend of the artist

‘I had been convinced that someone who had not known Tony personally, who was not party to the secret painting cultures of that time, was not the right person to write Tony’s life. I was quite wrong . . . Mark Forman’s understanding of Tony’s painting is profound and insightful, and his research is remarkable, as he recovers the memories of the survivors of the art scenes that Tony was part of with intelligence and sensitivity. You get a window that opens onto an Aotearoa rarely glimpsed. Yes, the interviews are telling, but Mark keeps his focus on Tony’s paintings: Tony’s pursuit of the exact technique to express his passionate hunger for transcendence through seeing. That way Tony could find redemption. Best image? Shirley Grace’s ‘Tony at Williamson Ave’. Brilliant. The first image, the all-too-human Tony, magicking himself into a best-version Tony, the role he so aspires to, the Tagaloa of the visually inspired.’
— Jacqueline Fahey, artist and friend of the artist

‘There is a real need for this book both in terms of a general assessment of Fomison’s significance as an artist, the shape of his evolution through three decades of his practice, his place in New Zealand art history, his relationship to his predecessors and contemporaries and the need to sift myth from fact in terms of his biography and career. Mark Forman has consulted almost everyone who can speak with any authority about Fomison’s life and career, and he has diligently searched the written record. Although not a trained art historian, he has brought an intelligent and empathetic perspective to Fomison’s life and art and has offered a convincingly well-rounded account of the man and his work.’
— Peter Simpson, author of the two-volume Colin McCahon