Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2022 i Art New Zealand

Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’ The south coast of Wellington is rugged and rambling, and has many faces. They include sunny, though chilly Riviera, picture-book pebbly seaside strand, and, on occasion, churning, storm-stirred cauldron that refuses to acknowledge the boundary between land and sea. As with many of our coastal regions, such masks hide a sicklier complexion, as when the heavens cry, the waters become unfit to swim, marred by life-threatening urban run-off. Such ‘civilising’ is at least blunted to a degree by the protections afforded by the Taputeranga Marine Reserve, which bars wanton pillaging of resources within a rectangle bounded to the north by the ‘median high water mark’. As a hard-to-define and…

Much delayed by Covid, this small but choice collection of works by Milan Mrkusich (1925-2018), shown at Auckland’s ArtSelect Gallery in April this year, was painted between 1992 and 1997, that is, towards the end of his long career. The Newmarket gallery is small—a single rectangular room—and the nine works displayed, most comprised of multiple parts, could easily have sustained a space five times as large. However, the close spacing and intimate setting had some definite advantages; it afforded an unusually close encounter with the works, including the opportunity to inspect Mrkusich’s immaculate surfaces from close range, and also to reflect on the intricate interrelations between various works and groupings. In some ways this exhibition felt like a kind of seminar—a practical demonstration of the nature of colour and the…

Rhonda Bunyan is the retired director of Stratford’s Percy Thomson Gallery. She now spends her time in an old schoolhouse she has converted into her studio, at Ōkato. Her photographic forte is large black-and-white photographs capturing everyday life in a way that is dramatically beautiful and challenging. Without colour, there are no distractions in her work, only form, and gradients of light and dark that play and spar with each other. Her subjects are an eclectic mix of no one specific genre, although she admits gritty cityscapes have the greatest appeal. Texture, reflections, dissolved forms and mannequins are an important part of Bunyan’s art. In Self-Portrait. Storm reflection, she herself is a smudged silhouette behind a plastic blind. Droplets of rain texture the foreground, conveying a haunting sense of transience.…

‘Let’s not forget there were women on the waka too, whānau’, warns one of the eponymous aunties of Jessicoco Hansell’s 2022 Aunti FM: To be of secret service (Physic Frequency Unknown), airing at the beginning of Auckland Art Gallery’s Declaration: A Pacific Feminist Agenda, curated by Ane Tonga. It is one of many reminders the exhibition makes: giving a determined focus to histories of matrilineal knowledge-making, holding and sharing that stretch across the temporal and physical space of the Pacific. Bringing together new commissions, loans and collection items, the artworks in the exhibition span the last quarter-century, while asserting the place of older, inherited, embodied and adopted genealogies in contemporary art practice. ‘WHITE WOMEN’S CONVENTION?’ asks a banner stretching above the strident Donna Awatere and Ramona Papali’i, printed larger-than-life in…

As a painter, Emily Elartley-Skudder’s work is concerned with objects as much as images—both those that she depicts, and the found objects that are frequently incorporated. Echoing the visual language of product photography and advertising, she transcribes the mundane detritus of everyday life into two dimensions with a precise, photorealistic attention to detail. Her practice, which often incorporates these paintings into sculptural installations, demonstrates a sustained interest in issues of framing and staging in both literal and metaphorical terms. In the 2017 installation work Soft Staging, Hartley-Skudder explored these aspects of staging through the creation of a pseudo-domestic scene in an alcove space at Hastings City Art Gallery. The alcove walls were painted a uniform pastel-pink colour, a border of peachy-toned, intricately patterned textured wallpaper running around their upper edge.…

Recently I was lucky enough to be given a guided tour of Emily Karaka’s Matariki-marking Ring of Fire, showing until September at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery in Titirangi. The artist was present, fresh off her 2021 residency at McCahon House where the bulk of these works were made. The show is massive, spread across two spaces, with 14 works in the larger and three in the smaller. I remember walking into the first and largest space and taking a breath, if only because the pulsating soundtrack (courtesy of Te Matera Smith of AAA Records) makes you feel like the room itself is breathing. There are 14 massive panels here, each depicting a maunga given back to their iwi and hapū through the Tūpuna Maunga Authority over the last eight…

The story of a life is as secret as life itself. A life that can be explained is no life at all. Elias Canetti (1905-1994) ‘Long time the girl wonder of Auckland art circles’ was reviewer Michael Brett’s characterisation.1 Yet now, except for friends and relatives, Suzanne Goldberg (1940-1999) is barely remembered in the local art ‘world’, such is the fickleness of taste and fortune. Eminent art historian Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) observed, ‘Luck plays a tremendous part in cultural history. The historical significance of an artist’s work is not necessarily recognised at the time of its production.’ He reflected, ‘It may be that in fifty years’ time, when critics look back on our own age, these people who are not now in the Museum of Modern Art will be considered…

Auckland James Cousins A Following Cadence Gow Langsford Gallery, 11 May-2 June EDWARD HANFLING James Cousins has been a fixture on the Gow Langsford schedule over the last decade. He is a crafty, clued-up and indefatigable exponent of a kind of painting that is at once abstract and representational. There is also a digital twist. Typically, the paintings have several layers, including imagery of plants and flowers transposed from photographs, spray-painted undulating bands and intricate geometric systems applied with vinyl stencils. The photographic source material is sometimes just visible, but often not really. In the present exhibition, ten of the 15 paintings tell us, through their subtitles—and perhaps through their colours, or even the wavy forms and vertical format— that there are flowers (lupins, to be precise, and more on…

Following the opening of Dame Robin White’s major retrospective exhibition at Te Papa,1 Mark Stocker asked her if she would be willing to answer some questions and discuss various points arising from it. The following is a record of the conversation between an inquisitive art historian and an artist whose work has been nicely described by Justin Paton as ‘not just interesting or compelling or elegant or whatever, but wise’.2 Mark Stocker: Is the Te Papa exhibition Robin White: Something is Happening Here a success? Robin White: It was a formidable task to get it looking right. I note the way that the works are given a fair amount of space which can facilitate concentration on them. The arrangement is logical and it shows a sensitivity to the places where…

If I had other senses, there are other things I should know. Nan Shepherd1 Encountering Josephine Cachemaille’s Be Soft Be Strong at Sanderson Contemporary in April this year felt a bit like walking in on a troupe of bewitched toys in the thick of an elaborate scheme. The complex installation felt mechanical but the characters all had palpable personality; each strange actor felt purposeful, its placement deliberate. The genesis of Be Soft Be Strong was the imminent departure of the artist’s daughter Rosa for university. Cachemaille says the show ‘was really about managing my feelings, finding a kind of exterior location for what was going on in my head’.2 She was ‘trying out ways of supporting her in my imagination, I suppose’. Together the forms are a technical drawing in…

Art measured against the universe dwindles to dust grains and reverberations in recent works by James Robinson. He makes fables about creation. He is the artist as artificer, on the verge of inventing his own religion, a syncretic mojo-man. And yet his prolific and obsessive output of metaphoric objects, assembled from found vernacular matter, is always in the service of beauty, at once haunting, forbidding, eerie. He just takes the long way round to get there: past the landfills we avert our gaze from, the waste lands that globalisation only recognises as eyesores ripe for redevelopment. Finding beauty in the abject, doing the heavy lifting, getting stuff back to the studio, Robinson is a kind of body builder, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of local painting, uniting disparate materials to bulge under…

Early twentieth-century New Zealand has been described as a country that ‘could only offer so much’ to its talented and ambitious artists.1 The obvious remedy for this predicament was overseas experience, mainly in Britain, where artists could undertake formal study and gain first-hand experience of the latest developments. Some who went, such as Frances Hodgkins and Raymond McIntyre, remained and established themselves in Britain, while others— among them Dorothy K. Richmond, A. H. O’Keeffe, Margaret Stoddart and Grace Joel—returned and furthered their careers in their New Zealand homeland. As if to balance this cultural migration, a much smaller number of individuals from Britain have spent time in New Zealand and contributed to the development of the local art scene. Chief among them is Christopher Perkins, lured by the enlightened La…