Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2019 i Art New Zealand

It is entirely appropriate that a tribute to the late Peter Webb should appear in this magazine, as he founded Art New Zealand in 1976 with Ross Fraser as editor. That was a bold venture at the time, and just one of Peter’s major contributions to our culture. He was a visionary who, as early as 1958, could see the beginnings of a mature contemporary art scene in New Zealand. He made it his life’s work to nurture that vision, laying the foundations for today’s art market. Although he was a businessman, the pursuit of profit was a secondary consideration. He believed that art was not something to make occasional brief expeditions into, but something one believes in before everything else—a way of life. He imparted this passion to many…

Edith Amituanai Double Take Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi 11 May–14 July, curated by Ane Tonga Edith Amituanai is capturing the world as it happens. Hers are images that respond to the times, and in doing so achieve a remarkable timelessness; images which reflect on the eternity of the in-between. And what times to choose: best of, worst of, the end of the world. These are times in which our interior and exterior lives have become increasingly blurred; in which the imaging and reimaging of identity has been repeatedly and dividedly contested. And yet Amituanai’s images circle these concerns with a distinct wariness. It is as if she is determined to document not the moment of impact, the crashing of the wave on the shore, but rather its far-reaching…

. . . Venice, lost and won, Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done, Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence she rose! Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Soon after the 58th Venice Biennale opened this year, a giant cruise ship lost control in the Giudecca Canal, failing to stop and, with horns droning, glided intractably into another boat and the dock. A tourist from Aotearoa was one of five people injured. This was all coincidence, of course; but I’ll come to that. Cookies left by my travel plans may have fed an algorithm. Within hours at home in Auckland I viewed video online. Phones had captured multiple angles on the accident. By the time I got to Venice myself, an image of the collision lingered on photocopied posters in the residential…

Auckland X-Marks: Conversations in Cloth Northart, 10 June–3 July BRONWYN LLOYD Historical record reveals a paucity of written testimonies by missionary women in New Zealand prior to 1823, which led textile scholar and embroiderer Vivien Caughley to make the startling comment in the preface to her book New Zealand’s Historic Samplers (2014) that a sampler ‘may be the only words of a woman which survive’. Underpinning the exhibition X-Marks: Conversations in Cloth, coordinated by Vivien Caughley, Maureen Lander, Jo Torr and Caitlin Timmer-Arends, is the resonant idea of the stitched or ‘marked’ sampler as a forgotten voice that reaches across time to speak its story. Originating at Te Kongahu Museum of Waitangi in 2018, X-Marks appears in a slightly reduced form at Northart. There is a mystery at…

Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki 4 May–1 September, curated by Mary Kisler There are many ways one could construct an exhibition of Frances Hodgkins’ work—and over the years a number of shows, some thematic, some exploring her development or connections with other artists, have been staged by New Zealand galleries.1 To mark the 150th anniversary of Hodgkins’ birth, curator Mary Kisler has chosen to orchestrate Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki’s Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys around the artist’s peripatetic life after she left the land of her birth in 1901, ultimately never to return. Kisler has also headed the development of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné, which has led her to visit many of the locations where Hodgkins painted, and the exhibition also capitalises on this…

Finding Frances Hodgkins by Mary Kisler Massey University Press, Auckland 2019 KYLA MACKENZIE Frances Hodgkins never a home of her own, and therefore was not ‘owned’ by a home. Untethered to a conventional middle-class life, she moved on average six times a year. Her circle of friends and associates in Britain included Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Myfanwy and John Piper, Christopher Wood and art patron Lucy Wertheim. Hodgkins thrived, struggled, rallied, evolved. She achieved solid critical success late in life. Her itinerant lifestyle reflected various, shifting needs, including: financial and teaching imperatives, visual and psychological stimulation, refuge and peace, warmth, light, colour, and ease of living. Her travelling also reflected the ongoing European tradition of sketching in idyllic villages. Curator and author Mary Kisler sees part of…

Bruce Connew is a New Zealand photographer and artist who has made images since the early 1970s. He earned wide respect for his work with the New Zealand Listener before setting afloat his independent, project-based work with the 1985 book and exhibition series South Africa. His photographic practice evinces a fascination with language and storytelling, expressing itself in a wide variety of modes. In some cases his photographs complement another writer’s story, or rather the writer’s story complements his series, while in other instances he is the author. Some projects include no text at all. His current project about the New Zealand Wars centres around photographing the text that appears on gravestones and memorials, which is an unusual way of combining textual and visual elements. I asked him how he…

Judy Millar The Future and the Past Perfect Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland, 2 March–19 May curated by Roland Wäspe Frozen Gesture: Gesture in Painting—from Roy Lichtenstein to Katharina Grosse Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, 18 May–18 August curated by Konrad Bitterli, Lynn Kost & Andrea Lutz Judy Millar’s painting was the subject of an overview exhibition curated by Roland Wäspe, Director of the Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland from March through May 2019: Judy Millar: The Future and the Past Perfect.1 It was a rich, concentrated, enriching and concentrating exhibition, undertaken with care, insight and remarkable acuity by both Wäspe and Millar. Shown in seven large naturally lit rooms on the first floor of the neo-classical revivalist museum, the paintings and masking-tape works offered a compelling invitation for engagement, contemplation and activated response…

I do not dream of Sussex Downs, Or quaint old English quaint old towns, I think of what may yet be seen In Johnsonville and Geraldine. Denis Glover, Home Thoughts (1936) In the mid-1960s a rookie photographer called John B. Turner roamed the streets of a plain Wellington suburb taking photographs of the built environment. Johnsonville then was experiencing a growth spurt which saw its population increase by nearly 40 per cent in the decade between 1956 and 1966. Until the later 1930s it had been a small, semi-rural settlement adjacent to the capital, but from 1938 it became the site of the new Labour government’s expanding housing scheme and it rapidly transformed into a dormitory suburb populated by young families, accruing the name of ‘nappy valley’, and attracting small…

Like the futurist movement before it in Italy, the Futuro house1 announced in its very name a self-conscious awareness not only of its modernity, but its intentions regarding the here-to-come. While it can be argued that the Italian futurists were less of the moment (let alone the future) than their French cousins the cubists, the Futuro houses were very much of their time, although their early promise and excitement did not last. Now they are retro cult objects for collectors of the funky with a name that has been appropriated by investment bankers. Among the collectors of Futuro houses in New Zealand have been Nick McQuoid of Rangiora (still an avid enthusiast and owner of several over the years) and, in Auckland, Grant Major and Judy Darragh who bought one…