Bill Hammond, renowned New Zealand artist, dies aged 74

Renowned New Zealand artist Bill Hammond has died, prompting an outpouring of grief and aroha from Kiwis. He was 74.

Hammond was born in Christchurch in 1947 and studied at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. He later gained recognition for cityscapes incorporating elements of film noir, pop culture and comic book references. The Christchurch Art Gallery described his work at a 2007 exhibition as “awash with visual sampling, splicing and mixing”.

Before becoming a full-time artist in the 1980s, Hammond worked as a wooden toy maker, in a sign factory, and as a jewellery designer.

After a trip to the remote and windswept Auckland Islands in 1989, his work began to include birds, which he used to explore a preoccupation with the environment and social justice issues.

The Christchurch gallery wrote that Hammond was apparently “moved by the sight of hundreds of large seabirds lined up on the rocky foreshore, staring out to sea.”

In a statement after his death, it praised his work as “original and unforgettable”, adding that his exhibitions had been “extremely popular with visitors from near and far”.

“Bill has that rare quality in an artist; he’s someone who is highly regarded by his peers, but whose works appeal to people from all walks of life,” the gallery’s director, Blair Jackson, said.

Many of his later works imagined a world without humans – a theme also inspired by the Auckland Islands.

“The Auckland Islands are like New Zealand before people got here. It’s bird land,” Hammond told Gregory O’Brien for his book Lands and Deeds.

His most famous work, The Fall of Icarus (after Bruegel), studies the impacts of colonisation on New Zealand. Academic Lawrence Simmons described the work in an essay for B.210 magazine as depicting an: “An endlessly interpreted world in which practically everything is metaphor and nothing merely itself.”

Hammond rarely gave interviews but works have been extensively reproduced and hang in galleries, family homes and student flats around the country.

On Monday the New Zealand Herald described him as one of the country’s “most influential artists.”

On Twitter, New Zealand art critic Hamish Keith described Hammond as one of New Zealand’s “finest artists” and a lovely man with a “unique vision from the very beginning,” while Christchurch journalist James Macbeth Dann said his favourite Hammond period was “the proto-grunge of his pink, punk canvasses of the 80s”.

Actor Sam Neill described him as a “sweet man; humorous, gentle and lively company. But as an artist – fiercely original and quite simply a damned genius.”

Ruth Dyson, a former Christchurch MP, described Hammond on Twitter as a “legend” and an “extraordinary talent”.