Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2019 i Art New Zealand

Michael Shepherd is one of our country’s most distinguished contemporary artists. Born in Hamilton in 1950, Shepherd spent his early years in Ngaaruaawahia. This Waikato upbringing has played a key role in Shepherd’s artistic career. Youthful proximity to the sites of pivotal events in New Zealand’s nineteenth-century history fuelled in Shepherd a decades-long fascination with exploring the complexities of the colonial era and its legacies. Since the 1980s, Shepherd has been producing intricate, painterly works, often in series, that engage with history and memory, mining connections between past and present, frequently on his Waikato home-turf. Curated by Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Rankin, Art History, University of Auckland, Michael Shepherd: Reinventing History Painting brings together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Shepherd’s ‘historical’ paintings from public and private collections, as…

Auckland Darryn George Hikoi Gow Langsford Gallery 31 October–24 November PETER SIMPSON Before Hikoi, I was aware of Darryn George’s work but had not looked at it closely. I had formed the impression of smart, coherent abstractions with strong colours and clean lines, including explicitly Maori elements (especially kowhaiwhai patterns), and of a stylistic whakapapa in which Gordon Walters (among others) figured prominently. What I found most interesting about his work was to see Walters being (as it were) reindigenised―an interesting circulation of painterly ideas, especially given the controversy in the 1990s surrounding Walters’ adaptation (appropriation?) of Maori design elements, notably the koru. The biggest surprise of George’s new exhibition was to find Walters replaced (or joined) by McCahon as a pervasive point of reference. This connection is…

Now based in Vienna, Andre Hemer came out of Christchurch and onto the scene in the early 2000s, one amongst many taking a blowtorch to the formal values of abstract painting. His playful amalgamations of paint and computer-generated imagery were easy on the eye but difficult to evaluate: innovative or merely clever? As time goes on, I admire more and more Hemer’s seriousness, ambition and refusal to rest on any one bag of tricks. When I see Hemer’s paintings I feel materials. Paint is more palpable than ever in Hemer’s most recent exhibition, Day Paintings, at Gow Langsford Gallery in Auckland. A few blobs of the stuff stick out from otherwise immaculately flat surfaces, as if to emphasise to the viewer that these are indeed paintings despite the intervention of…

Since 2012, The Dowse Art Museum has hosted a biennial exhibition celebrating the work of local artists and offering the opportunity to create new work for a focused location. Despite its somewhat misleading Solo title, it is the diversity of practice in these small group shows that is key to their liveliness. This year’s chosen six―Deanna Dowling, Sonya Lacey, Dave Marshall, Annie McKenzie, Matthew McIntyre Wilson (Nga Mahanga, Titahi) and Andrew Beck―exemplify the broad church of the contemporary art world. Deanna Dowling engages with ‘the socio-political, economic and geological histories of the land’ and how humans change it.1 Her installation Young Wood is Restless (2018) is rooted in her fascination with the built environment of Japan. During study trips there, she has meditated on materials, construction, and cycles of use,…

Potpourri, with its clear lesbian identities and motifs, is political. It is a meditation on visibility, on making present what is often absent. American poet Mary Ruefle uses various methods to explore ‘presence and absence’. Reviewer Jennifer H. Fortin says of Ruefle’s language that ‘what’s noticed draws forth what’s absent. The previously absent is now present, as real as any other reality.’1 These words could be applied to Potpourri. Making visible, ‘coming out’, has been an effective strategy in lesbian/gay liberation, but, in the art world, lesbians are frequently invisible. In 1996, Cherry Smyth recorded that it was not until 1977 that an article ‘Lesbian Art and Artists’ was published (in US feminist journal Heresies) and not until 1980 that the Great American Lesbian Art Show was held (at The…

Let’s start with the American photographer Ansel Adams who famously said, ‘Photography is about knowing where to stand’. Even a quick look at Peter Peryer’s work confirms that this was a man who knew how to be in the right place at the right time. And now standing’s on the table, that’s something else Peter was good at, standing up for photography itself. From his earliest experiments with a camera, Peter was a powerful advocate for a medium he felt both underrepresented and undervalued. If that makes him sound defensive it is not intended, for Peter was a larger-than-life presence in the New Zealand art scene for more than 40 years. His raucous laugh, voracious curiosity and old-world charm made him an unforgettable character and a memorable friend. The first…

Jane Zusters’ images of Christchurch, after the earthquakes of 2010–11 that changed this part of the world forever, are formidable and surreal. And she was certainly in the midst of it. Flung to the ground in the inner city on 22 February, she managed―after quickly recovering batteries scattered from her fallen camera―to take several photographs in Manchester Street directly after the major shake. Her instinctual response was matched by individual strength; but, as she muses now, ‘How often do you get subject matter like this?’ A remarkable series of photomontages has emerged from images taken that day and in those which followed. Relatively ordered sitting rooms and bedrooms of her friends, including many artists, have been matched with the destruction and dismay which was outside for some―but in for many.…

During my 15 or so years teaching drawing in Adult Education classes at the University of Canterbury, I enjoyed presenting brief illustrated lectures, focusing on figurative paintings, by both local and international artists. Often, I included two favourite self-portraits by New Zealand women: one by Jacqueline Fahey (b.1929) and the other by Ivy Fife, an artist from a previous generation who taught Fahey at the Canterbury College School of Art and is rarely discussed today. Although painted within a year of each other, the treatment of each subject differs markedly, and both portraits offer highly individual, intriguing images of ‘self’―each revealing as much as it conceals. Wrapped in brimmed-hat and scarf, Fahey’s Self-portrait with sunglasses (1961) is all glamour and style. In marked contrast, Ivy Fife’s I.G.F. (1960) presents herself…

At the small private memorial held at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi in Wellington for Vivian Lynn, who passed away after a long illness on 1 December 2018, an old friend spoke about first meeting her and Jürgen Waibel, her partner of nearly 50 years.1 This would have been in Wellington in the 1970s even before the pair moved into the turreted villa that is still their home in Newtown. Answering their advertisement for a lodger, the then young man found himself living with two artists, she with her waist-length hair and flowing bohemian dresses, he a young and handsome German. He described how fascinating they were, with their talk about art and their outlook on the world. He spoke about how ‘cool’ they seemed and how they…

At first I thought Anoushka Akel’s paintings were bodies. Small, square bodies made of canvas. Oiled, rubbed, stained and stroked so they might take on the buttery smoothness of skin. And like fleshly bodies, these canvas bodies show signs of wear and tear (AKA living), are bruised, marked and flayed, scraped back and painted over; purple skin rubbed with balm, treated carelessly and then laboriously healed. The first time I visit her Auckland studio, Akel is tenderly buffing the grainy, reddish surface of a painting with a soft cloth dipped in linseed oil. The studio is new to her, one of the many boons she has been afforded as the 2018 recipient of The C Art Trust Award―a grant of $50,000 bestowed upon an outstanding mid-career artist, enough to support…

Ko Kapakapanui te maunga Ko Waikanae te awa Ko Kahe te rau o terangi te moana ki Kapiti Ko Whakarongotai o Waikanae te marae Ko Kaitangata te hapu Ko Tokomaru te waka Ko Metapere Waipunahau te wahine rangatira raua ko Wi Parata te kakakura oku tupuna As Hariata Ropata Tangahoe recites her pepeha, she reflects on her inspiration as an artist. ‘My work is grounded in the importance of visions as a way of connecting with my ancestors,’ she explains. ‘The past, the present and the future―they’re all interwoven.’1 Outspoken and fiercely independent, she brings a singular focus and conviction to her work, constantly extending her practice through the study of art, te reo and matauranga Maori. Born in Otaki in 1952, of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa and Te Atiawa…

Upon the water, before the distinct sight of an attenuated volcanic cone, in a photograph taken by Pamela Allen in 1974, Jim Allen and Bruce Barber sit aboard a yacht with American art critic Lucy Lippard. Five years earlier, in an essay written with John Chandler, Lippard observed ‘a profound dematerialization of art, especially of art as object’.1 Lippard and Chandler wrote of a breaking up of traditional art media together with the ‘introduction of electronics, light, sound, and, more important, performance attitudes into painting and sculpture’. Lippard would go on to extend this thesis in Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries and it was this 1973 publication that, as Allen recalled, was devoured and…

The British neo-romantic movement, covering the period 1930–55, is currently experiencing something of a revival of interest. It has been the subject of several recent exhibitions, showcasing such artists as Edward Bawden, John Craxton, Enid Marx, John Minton, Paul Nash, John Piper and Eric Ravilious.1 Several of the above were closely connected; in 1925 when Paul Nash was a tutor at the Royal College of Art he observed an ‘outbreak of talent’ among the students, who then included Ravilious, Bawden and Marx.2 Certain of them would have an influence on New Zealand painting in the period following World War II. But in Britain, neo-romanticism fell out of favour with the arrival of pop art and American abstract expressionism, and its renewal has been dated to a 1983 exhibition at the…