Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2016 #157 i Art New Zealand

Reciprocity is invited of the viewer in the curatorial structure of Tame Iti and Birgit Krippner’s recent Melanie Roger exhibition, Iti. His paintings are shown alongside Krippner’s photographic portraits of Iti. An interest driven by curiosity about his political persona is acknowledged and, furthermore, responded to through this collaboration. Well known to the public as the twice-jailed full tamoko-wearing Maori human rights activist, Iti’s political practice is indistinguishable from his kaupapa toi. This appearance in the dealer gallery circuit1 opens a space from the outside into the little-ruptured hegemony of a predominantly Pakeha art world. However, while Iti represents confrontation to many in the country who just voted John Key into a third term, we are presented, through Krippner’s lens, with a vulnerable man. His assailability is most striking where…

The oldest hath borne most: We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long. King Lear Kees Hos and Tina de Leede (later his wife) studied at Holland’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, graduating in 1938 in art education. The following year he became a lecturer there, a position he held for 16 years until they both immigrated to New Zealand. Kees also studied graphics at the Amsterdam State Academy and won the Prix de Rome for etching in 1940. He did not go to Rome due to the political situation and World War II. In 1940 the black cloud of German occupation and anti-Semitism seeped into and smothered Amsterdam and The Hague. Kees and Tina joined the Resistance and daily risked their…

Patrick Lundberg’s tiny balls loom large, a necessary distraction from some of the froth and flab served up elsewhere in the Auckland Art’s Gallery’s perspective on what’s hot in contemporary New Zealand painting. I would say Lundberg is a cut above anything else in New Zealand art for the moment. He has been making these multi-part works on round-headed pins for several years-perhaps the longest he has stuck with one modus operandi-and they get better and better. Twenty-four pins is more than I have seen him use in one work before, and while their physical presence is negligible, they occupy three walls and a lot of time. Compared to earlier examples, the balls appear to be more uniform, so their differences become more critical. They are all pale green and…

A 1960s perpetual motion machine forever blowing bubbles, David Medalla’s Cloud Canyons No. 25 (1963/2015) represents the high modernist moment at a peak of delicious possibility. In the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, this kinetic work of art by the Filipino-born artist is old-school canonical: the avant-garde as it used to be. It is possible to trace a thematic thread from Medalla’s slomo white foam fountain, ensconced on the top floor of the GOMA building at one end of the Triennial, back to the keynote showpiece, resembling a gigantic lampshade, dangling above the QAG building’s Watermall pond at the other end of the Triennial. An airy assemblage of lattices constructed out of 1012 sets of aluminium Venetian…

I have always been drawn to Nigel Brown’s spirited depiction of animals, none more so than his little black dogs. Encircling a joyous painting, Brown scrawls in his archetypal thick black capital letters: ‘HERE I GIVE THANKS TO SMALL BLACK DOGS THAT RUN AND PLAY AND GLADDEN THE DAY.’ For an image pared down to an often rudimentary gestural form, his black dogs are imbued with an impressively rich and expressive character. Brown is an iconographic magpie, gathering signs and symbols from everywhere to use in his art. His sources range from Giotto and Mantegna to a Weet-Bix packet, to ferns, kiwis or the black-singlet-clad Kiwi bloke and Captain Cook. While wildlife, such as kiwi, wood pigeon and more recently fantail and Highland cattle have emerged as characteristic imagery in…

When asked why he was bothering to paint each ridge in a mountain scene with such accuracy, Austen Deans turned and replied, ‘Because I have climbed them all.‘1 Alongside the emergence of modernism and abstraction in post-war New Zealand, Canterbury artist Austen Deans retained a commitment to traditions of nineteenth-century landscape painting. The emergence of modernist art in our country dates from the late 1940s, but it was in 1954 that the milestone exhibition Object and Image, at the Auckland City Art Gallery, publicly proclaimed a significant break from traditions of naturalism and figuration. Object and Image signalled the introduction of a distinct ‘New Zealand’ modernism, featuring works by artists such as Colin McCahon, Milan Mrkusich and Louise Henderson.2 In addition, the emergence of dealer galleries committed to supporting contemporary…

Olivia Spencer Bower: Making Her Own Discoveries by Julie King Canterbury University Press Christchurch 2015 PRISCILLA PITTS Olivia Spencer Bower’s work has been only briefly acknowledged in the history of New Zealand art and only a limited selection of her work is familiar to most of us. This is significantly remedied in Olivia Spencer Bower: Making Her Own Discoveries, which shows a far greater breadth of media, subject and approach than the artist is generally known for. Many of the works in this book were unfamiliar to me, and it says something about the focus of so many histories of New Zealand art that it is Spencer Bower’s landscapes that have mostly been selected for reproduction. As Julie King demonstrates, Spencer Bower could be an expressive portraitist and drew with…

Don Abbott is Deputy Editor of Art New Zealand. His book Vivid: The Paul Hartigan Story was published last November. Gabrielle Amodeo is a Wellington artist and writer, now on residency at The Banff Centre, Canada. She is currently Contributing Editor on a forthcoming publication in collaboration with Enjoy Public Art Gallery, researching artist-run spaces in New Zealand. Lydia Baxendell is the Art Collections Curator at University of Canterbury. She has spent the last decade working in curatorial roles within dealer, public and institutional arts environments. In 2011 she was awarded a Master of Arts with Distinction in Art History, University of Otago. Grant Banbury is an art consultant, curator, writer and art educator based in Christchurch. Lucinda Bennett is currently studying towards her MA in Art History at The…

The last cover of Art New Zealand featured crisp, glowing detail from the painting Industry by John Weeks (1936, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki). It may interest your readers to know that it includes a painted likeness of the artist-in profile. Furthermore, it was reported to Joan Mackie, the first scholar of John Weeks’ oeuvre, that the artist himself had once worked in a foundry. Industry then, has an autobiographical dimension to consider which adds a level of intrigue to its intimate, contemplative content. Kyla Mackenzie University of Auckland…

When you met Barry Brickell you never forgot him. The first time I saw him was on the cover of a 1966 edition of Coal magazine (my father was a coalminer on the West Coast). There was Barry, a potter who used coal to fire his kiln. ‘I want to meet this man,’ I thought. My first encounter with him was at Yvonne Rust’s Greymouth pottery workshop, and she had invited Barry down to help build her kiln. Yvonne turned Barry’s visit into an event, and had invited the local mayor and the councillors to view the building of the kiln. Barry was there, working away, dressed in just a small pair of shorts, which resembled more a loincloth than proper attire, his flesh covered in sweat and coal dust,…