Astroform No. 7

Edward Bullmore was born in Balfour, Murihiku Southland, in 1933 and studied at the Canterbury College School of Fine Arts in Ōtautahi during the 1950s. He left Aotearoa for Europe in 1959, initially travelling to Italy before settling in London, where he spent much of the following decade. He produced paintings in a surrealist vein and later began experimenting with shaped supports, sculptural elements, and the pictorial language of non-objective art.

Astroform No. 7 belongs to one of the most important series of Bullmore’s career. With the Astroform series, he explores the painting as a bodily entity projecting into real space rather than a flat surface. The works combine humour, sensuality, and a slightly disquieting psychological charge. They also situate Bullmore within a wider international artistic context, engaging with the idea of the expanded field of painting that was emerging in the 1960s.

The Astroform works have affinities with contemporaneous experiments in shaped painting and assemblage, yet they retain a distinctive surrealist sensibility. The originality of Bullmore’s approach attracted attention at the time. A work from the series was acquired by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and appears within the set design of his 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.