Art New Zealand Spring 2021

Auckland Martin Ball Echo: A Brush with History Orexart, 10 April–1 May MICHAEL DUNN Ball To many ’s Echo will come as a surprise. Instead of his meticulously crafted drawings and portraits we find a display of landscapes depicting the famous Pink and White Terraces, once natural wonders that drew tourists from around the world, but which disappeared from view as the result of the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886. While the show is a change of direction it does have continuities with his earlier work. The new paintings are sourced in historic photographs of the terraces taken by George D. Valentine. Ball began this series in 2005 but has evolved it mainly since 2018. In notes for the show, he states that he has used photocopied…

Denys Watkins has been one of New Zealand’s most open-minded artists over the past five decades. He has sometimes, quite suddenly, changed medium or style, responding to new stimuli or in order to stave off stasis, to challenge himself. Conceptual art, pop art and colour field abstraction all played a part in the early years. However, Watkins regularly finds inspiration outside of the western art canon, absorbing into his work imagery encountered on overseas travel or inquisitively gleaned from a wide range of print media. His paintings have changed from precisely rendered visual jokes to fuzzy dreamscapes to the mainly abstract ‘constructions’ that have occupied him more recently. Watkins taught at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts from 1980 to 2011, and in 2017 had a survey…

I’ve made larger than life pieces and at the same time I’ve always made very small and intimate pieces which were more like fleeting thoughts, but which may have had a big idea behind them . . . as my art education evolved and my interest in things grew beyond just working with clay . . . I was working more with ideas than with just making product. Christine Boswijk, 20201 Moving reflectively through the exhibition space of Christine Boswijk: Thinking Through My Hands offered a fresh experience of major work. Breathing life into clay is a metaphor that this artist has referred to throughout her career. As she states in her foreword to the show’s catalogue, she would ‘breathe life into it, fire it, and my thoughts would become…

Two of the Walters Prize finalists do one thing, and two another. Sonya Lacey and Sriwhana Spong make art that revolves around themselves, and their installations are collections of parts. The works of Fiona Amundsen and the Mata Aho Collective/ Maureen Lander, on the other hand, reflect many voices, coordinated into a total entity. Lacey and Spong use multiple mediums across works that variously intrigue, delight, impress and perplex. You first respond to the things in the space, and to what the materials are doing, before making sense of them (unless you have read a good deal beforehand). Then comes the backstory, filling in the gaps with complicated histories within which the artists are at once insignificant and central figures. With Amundsen and the Mata Aho Collective/ Lander, there is…

At first sight Alan Ibell’s paintings may seem somewhat bland and unchallenging. They do not leap out at you but instead have seductive qualities that gradually emerge as we contemplate them one by one. We start to grasp that there is a slippage between what we see superficially and what is suggested beneath the surface of these images. In notes about his show Ascendants, held at Sanderson Contemporary earlier this year, Ibell writes: ‘One of my main interests is in creating a space within the paintings that recalls the subconscious or a psychological environment like that of a dream―a space where the strange and the mundane/domestic cohabit.’ This helps us to understand, for example, The Return, in which a small figure is set in a foreground plane with a soft…

From the chew-them-up, spit-them-out experiences in New York downtown galleries in the 1980s to recent blockbuster surveys such as 2010’s Art in the Streets at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, graffiti and street art have a complicated history with galleries and museums. From rebellious outsider forms that bypassed institutional support, urban art’s popularity, ubiquity and influence have made for an interesting, if challenging, proposition for display. As urban art has gained more widespread attention, this relationship has followed similar trajectories here in Aotearoa, with disparate and independent excursions accompanied by the crowd-pleasing Rise at Canterbury Museum in 2013 and Paradox at Tauranga Art Gallery in 2016. Additionally, local graffiti and street artists have increasingly embraced more expansive approaches, shifting between street, studio and gallery, retaining the influence of their…