Art New Zealand Autumn 2022

The life work of Robert Ellis has given New Zealand’s cultures the gift of a bridge every generation will find it easy and enriching to cross. In 1956 Robert Ellis, recently graduated from the Royal College of Art and a lecturer in design at Yeovil School of Art, spotted an advertisement for a similar post at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, New Zealand and applied immediately. He knew nothing about New Zealand. He did not particularly want to be there, but did not want to be where he was. He got the job. Robert had had his fill of hate and violence. At war’s end he had been conscripted to the Royal Air Force as an aerial photographer. No surprise there, given a lifetime of images of the…

Auckland Michael Smither Here & Now Artis Gallery, 9–29 November MICHAEL DUNN Painted in his early eighties, Michael Smither’s recent show, Here & Now, has a freshness and energy in both its conception and execution that is surprising in what he has called ‘the paintings of my old age’. He makes the New Zealand landscape take on an intensity of colour and mood that demands our attention and requires us to rethink our relationship with somewhat familiar subject matter. These works are not fussy or bogged down with detail. Instead Smither paints with great breadth and boldness of execution, in some cases with slashes of pigment, as we see in Rain Squall, Kennedy Bay, or the vibrant blue and white Peninsula Rain Squall. This approach is very different…

Looking from afar—from present to past, from exile to homeland, from island back to mainland, mountaintop at lowland—results not in vision’s diffusion but in its sharpening; not in memory’s dispersal but in its plenishment. Robert MacFarlane1 It may be because I am a hand-on-heart extrovert, but from the first time I read about the Pacific concept of the vā, I envisaged an infinite expanse of bright ether filled with faint, warm chatter. Described by Albert Wendt as ‘not space that separates but space that relates’, the vā can be understood as ‘the space that is context, giving meaning to things. The meanings change as the relationships/the contexts change.’2 The spaces that held Stars start falling—first at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and then Te Uru Waitākerebecame an embodiment of the vā for…

Paemanu: Tauraka Toi―A Landing Place is a momentous exhibition spanning the second floor of Dunedin Public Art Gallery (DPAG). With predominantly new works from over 40 Ngāi Tahu artists, the show is curatorially dialogic, offering poignant moments of connection. Tauraka Toi was described to me as ‘fresh’ but this does not quite capture it as the exhibition deserves to be read within the diversity of Ngāi Tahu hapū and whānau worldviews which are exceedingly expansive. Tauraka Toi continues the palimpsest of toi Ngāi Tahu with glimpses from each work building a layered and multifaceted universe. This world resists linear time in favour of aspherical understanding, of reaching through whakapapa, in any direction, and holding a narrative, place or person in order to tell your story. Paemanu are a collective of…

I begin then to compile an archive of my body, an activity that from the start feels discomfortingly intimate. Too intimate and too bewildering an undertaking, because like all other bodies mine has become so many things over time, has changed dramatically through forces both natural and social. Julietta Singh1 Can our bodies ever be truly autonomous? Or are the forces—both natural and social—which shape our physical existence in the world too persistent, too pervasive? The body may be read as the physical manifestation of self, but it is also a site upon which meaning is continuously inscribed. Often these meanings are beyond our control, dictated by the societal norms which police the boundaries of gendered and cultural identities. In the group exhibition Autonomous Bodies: Figurative portraits by New Zealand…

The exhibition Rare and Unrivalled Beauty: Landscape Paintings from the Kelliher Trust Art Collection has, at the time of writing, recently opened at the Millennium Public Art Gallery, Blenheim, making a stunning impact in its two gallery spaces. Throughout 2022 and early 2023, it will tour South Island art galleries in Nelson, Arrowtown, Ashburton, Ōamaru and Timaru. Te Papa would surely be a highly appropriate additional stop, making me irreverently speculate whether the exhibition might make a piquant complement to the recently opened Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist. Despite the obvious fact that the Kelliher paintings tell splendid stories of Aotearoa New Zealand, unfortunately this will never happen. Indeed, previous surveys of the nation’s art there have studiously avoided works of this kind, partly because of their conspicuously poor representation…