Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2021 i Art New Zealand

Auckland Alicia Frankovich AQI2020 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki 21 October–8 November VICTORIA WYNNE-JONES Haze. The steady sound of a helicopter approaching, then flying overhead. A slow rumbling. The squawk of cockatoos and a whoosh of wind as it fans audible flames. A persistent electronic drone and the thrum of a distorted bass guitar. These were selected components from a sound composition by Igor Kłaczyński for AQI2020, a commission from Melbourne-based, New Zealand artist Alicia Frankovich for the North Atrium of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Aside from Kłaczyński’s soundtrack to a slow-burning apocalypse, the installation consisted of an immense enclosure made of steel and lurid yellow acrylic. Within the box were six performers, an inflatable boat, collapsible deckchairs, chilly bins, blankets and towels, the…

Tribal warfare was a feature of early Aotearoa New Zealand, but from the mid-nineteenth century there was a new and common adversary. Arrivals from Europe put growing pressures on Māori land, and visual records of subsequent conflicts were produced by soldier artists such as Majors Gustavus von Tempsky and Charles Heaphy. In 1899 this country took part in its first overseas conflict, demonstrating loyalty to Britain by promptly despatching trained troops to South Africa. Few images resulted from those experiences on the veldt, but the tradition of appointing official artists began with the next major conflict, the Great War of 1914–18. Nugent Welch, George Butler and Captain A. Pearce were instructed to make sketches of the Western Front that could be used later as a basis for studio paintings.1 A…

Max Gimblett and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s handsome 2011 gift of 201 works on paper to Christchurch Art Gallery has finally reached the walls of the gallery. These are the basis for a compelling exhibition, Max Gimblett: Ocean Wheel, curated by Peter Vangioni. The show combined a selection of around 50 of the gifted works together with five additional large paintings from the gallery’s own collection and elsewhere—a sagacious decision which enabled the works on paper to be seen within the wider context of Gimblett’s output without being overwhelmed by works on a grander scale. So, although the exhibition properly focuses on the gifted works—spread over almost a half-century—it is also cognisant of the artist’s wider project. On the verso of a large poster of one of Gimblett’s signature enso drawings (a…

E ngā iwi, e ngā reo, e ngā karangatanga maha o ngā hau e whā, tēnei te mihi atu kia koutou katoa1 The title of Toi Tu Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art both announces and establishes the conceptual premise of the exhibition curated by Nigel Borell, the ex-curator of Māori art at Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery. The word toi is largely understood as art and knowledge but it can also be interpreted another way, to mean peak or summit, so can be perceived as something that is elevated, that has reached a certain stature or metaphorical height. Perhaps more explicitly, toi can also be translated as native or indigenous, which Māori are as tangata and mana whenua of Aotearoa. Māori art by inference then, can be defined as,…

edited by Hannah Valentine & Gabriella Stead Auckland University Press, Auckland 2020 MICHAEL DUNN As one of our best-known and commercially successful painters whose garden images have iconic status, Karl Maughan was an obvious choice for a lavish coffee-table book. Karl Maughan, produced by Gow Langsford Gallery in collaboration with Auckland University Press, is a seductive and colourful publication which showcases his art to great effect. There are over 150 paintings reproduced here in large colour plates, many taking a full page so that they do justice to the works. Some show astonishing details of his paint application where the strokes and slashes of thick impasto have an almost abstract effect of light, colour and pattern. They demonstrate that Maughan is a painter first and foremost not an illustrator or…

Russ Flatt won the 2020 Wallace Arts Trust Paramount Award with his work Kōruru (knucklebones). In his practice he constructs vignettes, and photographs them, each project forming the basis for a series of images; his swimming-pool studies appeared in Art New Zealand 149. Ron Brownson met with Flatt and their conversation began with a discussion about his award-winning image. Ron Brownson: Kōruru (knucklebones) was awarded last year’s Wallace Award. How did that image come about? Russ Flatt: During last year’s Covid-19 lockdown I spent lots of time with my whānau. I kept thinking about my mother, who passed in 2008. My mother grew up in Wairoa, rural Hawke’s Bay, with her ten sisters. The family had little money, but they whāngaied (a customary practice where a child is brought up…

It was a typical mid-winter’s morning in Tāmaki Makau-rau, low brooding clouds suspended just out of arms’ reach as I ascended Te Maungarei ā Pōtaka (Mt Wellington). In 2017 this significant volcanic cone featured heavily in my research for Whenua Fonua ’Enua, which delved into the multiple layers of stories that are part of the history of East Auckland. The outcome of this research would culminate in an exhibition and publication in collaboration with photographer Brendan Kitto. As I reached the summit, the low brooding clouds released a light rain over the maunga. Walking along the summit towards the tihi I heard a soft yet clear voice asking me, ‘Will you go?’ I was taken aback as I knew I was there alone. I looked over the whenua which I…

If ever there were an art-historical equivalent of scoring a classic try on one’s All Black debut, it would be the so-called Smirnoff Sculpture. Its creator, Marté Szirmay, was aged just 22 when she won the commission in March 1969. Then virtually unknown—she had recently earned her Elam School of Fine Arts diploma and had just commenced teacher training—it marked the dream beginning of her career as one of this country’s foremost abstract sculptors. ‘Be very afraid!’ the lugubrious Don Binney warned her, having seen his own star wax and wane. But he need not have worried; fired by her consistently intelligent vision and a formidable work ethic, Szirmay’s career has thrived over six decades. Indeed, with well over 600 sculptures and medals large and small now to her credit,…

In Marti Friedlander’s 1979 black-and-white photograph, Ralph Hotere stands in front of a wooden fence outside his Port Chalmers studio holding a lit cigarette from which the ash has yet to fall, as if he’s been standing there a long time. With his beard and long hair, his black wool jersey, the punctuation point of his roll-your-own held close to his face, he has the aura of a jazz musician, a beatnik, an existentialist confronting the void, or else the air of an alert raptor eyeing far-off prey from his eyrie atop Observation Point. In the photographer’s presentation, the heroic, victorious advance of the modernist artist in the twentieth century is being acknowledged. Hotere’s measured pose might testify to his ability as an artist to astonish, seduce, convince, even as…

Ka mate ururoa, kei mate wheke Die like a shark, lest you die like a squid Die charging, rather than flailing1 Mangopare are a staple form of kōwhaiwhai and they also make up the building blocks of the surfaces of Tracey Tāwhiao’s recent installations. The design is known within customary practice to derive from the hammerhead shark, and the whakataukī loosely interpreted above is an equally well-known reference to the ancient fish characterised by speed, power, and courage. Tāwhiao does not necessarily call or think of these repeated marks as mangopare, but it is a connection that is difficult to avoid making. Not only do they resemble the well-known design element, but the way Tāwhiao applies them with fist closed around paint pen, direct and swift, as well as the…

She spread tissue on the cold bed of the press. Put down the plate, lifted the damp paper from its sheath of plastic (how fresh it smelt, how white it was). Placed it symmetrically over the zinc. Covered it with blotting paper, and felt and swanskin blankets. And then she pushed hard and the bed moved forward; she turned the handle relentlessly. Until she heard a metallic sigh and knew it was through. She lifted the print, bore it away, looked at it when no one could see. Barbara Hanrahan1 Few artists in Aotearoa New Zealand have dedicated themselves to printmaking as has Hamilton artist Ruth Davey. The exhibition Ruth Davey at the Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato2 shows an extensive collection of her prints, many of which…

In the age of media saturation and ever-decreasing attention spans, Stefan Roberts asks his viewers to slow right down and to appreciate once more the nature of time and our relationship with it. In his most recent work, the basic elements of photography—time and light—are also the subject of the finished works, as is the artist’s long-standing relationship with specific locations. Roberts was raised on a farm in rural North Canterbury. Waiau River—Waterlog—53mls not only references an iconic local river and the critical role it has played in the formation of the landscape he grew up with, but he also points out that water is a critical and much-contested natural resource in the region. The image was produced with a pinhole camera, fashioned from a tin can lined with old…