Innholdsfortegnelse for No 156 Summer 2015 i Art New Zealand

Auckland Seung Yul Oh HaaPoom Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, 29 August–8 November EDWARD HANFLING It is difficult to find writing about Seung Yul Oh that does not include the word ‘playful’. Te Uru’s director, Andrew Clifford, uses ‘playful’ twice and ‘play’ once over the course of seven paragraphs in the catalogue for Oh’s show, HaaPoom, and I will have exceeded those iterations before I have finished writing this review. But my point is that Oh’s work is not playful, or not simply so. Oh moved to New Zealand from South Korea in 2003, and graduated Elam in 2005, quickly attracting attention particularly for his glossy cartoonish sculptures. Last year the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington staged MOAMOA, a survey of the first ten years…

Settlement, as Emily Karaka proves in Settlement, an exhibition of 15 large paintings at Orexart Gallery in Auckland in July and August 2015, is a loaded word. Her paintings function as a form of archaeological fieldwork, revealing a hitherto concealed history. She is a radical painter in the sense of returning to roots and showing them as blitzed, zapped and blighted, with landscapes turned into contestable territories, zones of conflict; and then those landscapes regenerating, blossoming-albeit mutated, metamorphosed, chromatically complex. In New Zealand art terms, we think of the landscape paintings of Peter Siddell and others as showing the Auckland isthmus as quiescent, benign, ‘settled’, suburban. This ‘settlement’ is the legacy of the Arcadian visions, of the surveys and topographical depictions, of nineteenth-century painters. Karaka’s paintings challenge that calm ordering-the…

You could be forgiven for pigeonholing Lorraine Rastorfer’s paintings into a wave of New Zealand sensibility›the gestural combing of Judy Millar, the undulating hills of a landscape once envisaged by Colin McCahon, the sculptural stasis created by the mesh-like formations of Neil Miller. Art has a habit of sparking associations; and the 13 paintings included in the Wanderlust exhibition at Orexart are ripe with possible connections because of their innate ambiguity. They have a familiar quality that, when viewed as a collective, makes them seem pretty similar at a glance, still their presence begs a sense of intrigue that is at once melancholic and jaunty. Dispensing altogether with representational figuration, Rastorfer covers her canvases with energetically modulated linear systems of pigment, forming iridescent patterns and labyrinthine layers. Being a full-time…

In October 1783 mankind officially achieved liftoff, of sorts, when Étienne Montgolfier made a short ascent in a hot-air balloon tethered to the ground in Paris. The first free flights soon followed, proving it was possible to break free-albeit briefly and somewhat uncontrollably-from the grip of gravity. It was also possible to gain a whole new perspective on the earth beneath, one that had previously been the sole preserve of birds. This increased elevation enabled one to see further and, while it had obvious military advantages, there were also implications for artists, forcing a re-evaluation of the traditional view of a world more or less bisected by a horizon line. This link between art and aeronautics was strengthened in 1858 when another enterprising Frenchman, Nadar (pseudonym for Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), took…

Marté Szirmay: I don’t know any other home. The 1956 freedom fighters-my father was one-could never go back. A whole generation of Hungarian young men got exterminated. They either escaped or were killed. What’s going on now with the refugees-to me, it’s a nightmare. So I came here as a relatively traumatised youngster. My parents’ aim was to assimilate: live in peace; learn the language; not to say ‘I’m different from you, and I demand that . . . ’-no. My mum worked several jobs, so did my dad; we rarely saw the two of them together. They began again from nothing. Three kids, two adults, £15 that the Red Cross put in my dad’s bag, and the clothes we stood up in. To talk about home: in 1999, when…

In the age of Insta-challenges, selfies and the social currency of the click-like-share economy, visual culture can momentarily engage a seemingly infinite audience in a singular moment between photographer, lens and subject-viewer, screen and device. In 2014, South Auckland-based photographer Vinesh Kumaran set himself the challenge of using his iPhone to shoot and share a portrait a day via photo-sharing app, Instagram. Initially conceived as a means to keep creatively active between commercial jobs, the project became a daily ritual, a visual discipline and public obsession that engaged new and diverse audiences with each addition. The impressive series was made over 365 days; it traces Kumaran’s footprints across Auckland, to the Far North and Samoa, around Aotearoa and deep into the nooks and crannies of his home suburb of Mangere.…

In Pursuit of Venus [infected] by Lisa Reihana et al. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland 2015 Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015) is like a visual index of issues and identities. Panning horizontally like the menus of an electronic tablet, iPoVi provides a slow perpetual panorama of vignettes and characters set in a hyperreal tableau, each offering a way into layered narratives of cultural contact and exchange. The structure and main components are remixed from Joseph Dufour’s popular nineteenth-century panoramic wallpaper, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, which depicts the findings of Captain Cook’s Pacific journeys. Reihana brings this series of tableaux to life, expanded from the original 24 groupings to 32, filling in some of the original’s omissions and shifting the perspective to a…

For the best part of two decades Pamela Wolfe has focused her artistry on the painterly richness and metaphorical potential of plants, paying tribute to a long tradition of flower painting while seeking to express her subjects in a new and contemporary manner. Although her latest offerings bear little stylistic resemblance to her early works, the level of focus, interest, and assiduity has not diminished. Wolfe is a consummate forager, collector, and presenter of botanical goods. The composition of every piece is the result of her skill in carefully arranging the specimens, examining and photographing them from a variety of angles, and then transporting them onto canvas or paper. When the painting process extends beyond the life of the flowers, Wolfe uses the photographs for reference points. The results are…

While killing time before a movie at the Bridgeway recently, I was fortunate enough to happen upon a small survey exhibition of the work of little-known New Zealand artist June Black (1910–2009) at Blikfang Art and Antiques. As I walked through the front door of the art-based home interior space at Auckland’s Northcote Point, a feature wall populated by nine framed portraits and two remarkable ceramic sculptures greeted me. I could see immediately that the paintings were imaginary portraits, judging by their strange costumes, the childlike rendering of their faces, with a single black line from brow to chin, simple line-drawn eyes, and lips turned up in wry smiles. The first portrait I looked at, hung low on the wall, was of a smiling chap with a weird twisty contraption…

The absence of a large-scale John Weeks project since a hastily assembled 1965 retrospective is mystifying. That there has been no serious assessment of Louise Henderson’s work since The Cubist Years (1991) is perplexing. That Charles Tole received neither a survey exhibition in his lifetime, nor a subsequent retrospective, does New Zealand art history and its exhibiting institutions little credit. The reason for these absences can in part be traced to space-gobbling retrospectives of living artists, one-off projects by imported art stars and inflated prize-based contemporary projects that have in recent years reduced the gallery space devoted to the exploration and understanding of our cultural heritage. Generic long-term historical hangs, occurring alongside a move away from focused research, mean that less new historical scholarship appears on New Zealand gallery walls.…