Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023 i Art New Zealand

Kohukohu Tira, Rachel Miller & Denise Batchelor Heaven on Earth Village Arts, 1-30 April CATHY TUATO'O ROSS It would not take much to convince me that the Hokianga is heaven on earth. The ratio of sky to land, land to water, sound to silence, and privacy to community seem close to perfect. I am told it is a great place to be an artist. The three who have come together in this self-curated group exhibition pride themselves on being locals. The artwork, however, does not feel local or settled. On entering the gallery you are presented with three perfectly imperfect delicate green gourds (gifts) straight from Denise Batchelor's garden, demanding they be accorded the honour of being considered fineart objects, before being pulled in to Tira's Pakeha Pie. A swirl…

In March the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui opened one of its final exhibitions in its current home on Taupō Quay, prior to its long-awaited return to the original building at Pukenamu Queen's Park, scheduled for 2024. The strengthened, restored and much-beloved gallery will have the addition of a new wing, and the expansion will allow the institution to adequately and safely house its nationally significant art collection and bolster its education and hosting facilities. The exhibition in question pairs Zahra Killeen-Chance and Solomon Mortimer: partners in life and here as recipients of the Tylee Cottage artistinresidence programme managed by the Sarjeant. Although the artists have collaborated since 2012 and there is, at times, a deliberate integration of their modes of working, each retains a distinct focus, sensibility and sensitivity in…

The letters and postcards excerpted below1 (edited to about half the total length of the originals) were written between 1978 and 1985 by the Liverpool-born New Zealand artist Allen Maddox (1948–2000) to his fellow-artist, friend and near contemporary Tony Lane (born 1949), during what is generally recognised as the strongest period of Maddox's creative life—the late 1970s and early 1980s. After art school (Maddox was at Ilam in Christchurch, Lane at Elam in Auckland) both gravitated to Wellington in the early 1970s where they exhibited together on several occasions, including 3 Wellington Painters at Peter McLeavey Gallery in 1975.2 Maddox had solo shows at Elva Bett Gallery in 1973–75, at Peter McLeavey Gallery in 1977–78, 1983 and 1985, and at various Auckland galleries, including Peter Webb Galleries, Barry Lett Galleries…

Bill Main was New Zealand's foremost photohistorian. He originally studied painting at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts and went on to gain a position teaching art at Wellington Technical College in 1957. The college became Wellington Polytechnic a few years later and in 1976 he was its inaugural tutor on Wellington's first full-time photography course. Meantime, in 1972, Main produced his first book on historical New Zealand photography. He initially thought it would only take a few weeks but quickly found there was almost no information about the photographers behind the images he wanted to use. It took a year and a half of hard grind in this pre-digital era of trawling through old newspapers and physical archives before Wellington Through a Victorian Lens was ready for publication. Hardwicke…

Emma Bass has made her reputation as an artist with her colourful and flamboyant photographs of flowers. Not that her career began this way, for her current works have had a long gestation period. She associated with artists while growing up and did life drawing in the school holidays. In the 1980s, she also took an evening course in etching with Carole Shepheard at the Auckland Society of Arts. As a teenager she thought of going to Elam School of Fine Arts but eventually decided on a career in nursing. She went to London as a nurse for a few years where her artistic interests remained strong, and she took black-and-white photographs with a Pentax camera. She studied photography at the Leicester Square Camera Club in the evenings. Her works…

Greeting you at the door of City Gallery Wellington's Reuben Paterson retrospective The Only Dream Left is an enormous golden tree. The work (The Golden Bearing, 2014) was originally displayed in New Plymouth's Pukekura Park, a fitting home for this effigy from Eden. Even more than its mythic scale— and the uncanny meeting of natural form with gleaming synthetica—it is Paterson's trademark skein of glitter that manhandles the eye to linger. Once you adjust to the unnatural smoothness of the tree's trunk, the sandier diamante texture bewitches, in a way very similar to seeing bioluminescence for the first time. In the church-like hush of the gallery you are busy trying to figure out if you can trust your eyes or not. Throughout the show it is this uncanny valley in…

THE NATIONAL ART GALLERY PRESENTS / A NGA PUNA WAIHANGA EXHIBITION / TAKI TORU / THREE INSTALLATIONS BY MAORI ARTISTS / SELWYN MURU / PARATENE MATCHITT / RALPH HOTERE / 16 JULY – 28 AUGUST 1988 / AT / TEMPORARY/CONTEMPORARY … Shed 11 … Custom House Quay, Wellington1 Intoxicated by Te Maori, grieving for McCahon, and before the hangover of biculturalism set in, Ralph Hotere (1931–2013), Paratene Matchitt (1933–2021) and Selwyn Muru (b.1937), founding members of Ngā Puna Waihanga and operating at the height of their powers, came together to give us Taki Toru. Taki Toru commanded the entirety of Shed 11, a former Wellington Harbour Board store commandeered in 1985 as an offsite of the National Art Gallery under Luit Bieringa. Over four years, Shed 11: Temporary/Contemporary presented a…

Time can be a killjoy. When it is running out on you, you would do anything for a bit more of it. When there is too much of it at hand, it is the bane of your life. Thanks to the last few years such skewed views of time are universal, no longer the domain of the ill and the incarcerated. Taranaki-based Chauncey Flay's experience of time is skewed further by his stone sculpture practice, in which he defines form by removing grains of sand, slowly. Rather than submitting to time's tricks, he meets them head on, inventing a project that might defeat them: One Million Marks, or OMM for short. It was a simple plan, summed up in the title: Flay would create a work made up of one…

With the growing professionalism of painting in late nineteenth-century New Zealand, aspiring artists were advised which subjects were considered worthy of their contemplation. Unsurprisingly, the local landscape predominated. Such counsel was offered intermittently until the mid-1900s, since when—and with perhaps one notable exception—artists have enjoyed relative freedom in terms of deciding what to paint. In the first instance, the earliest images produced by Europeans in this country were intended as records. The best known of several by draughtsman Isaac Gilsemans on Abel Tasman's visit in 1642, the deadly confrontation between local Māori and Dutch crew members in present-day Golden Bay, has been described as ‘crudely drawn’ and with ‘a fine disdain for the rules of perspective’.1 Even so, and despite his unfamiliarity with Māori physiognomy and culture, Gilsemans did capture…