Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2024 i Art New Zealand

My friend Paul Dibble. I first met him in Albert Park in 1962. A bunch of us had finished enrolling for Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University and were loafing on a grassed slope. As we sat indulging in small talk whilst sizing up our companions to be, a giant fellow walked down towards us and in a loud voice laughingly declared to half of Auckland, ‘You buggers look scruffy enough to be the new art students.’ We were mightily impressed, firstly by the casual audacity of his self-introduction, and shortly thereafter by the quality of his swearing. Whilst I thought it something I was good at, Paul Dibble was much better. What you saw with Paul was what you got, and what you got was a constant.…

The late Moana Jackson often described whakapapa as a ‘series of never-ending beginnings’, referring to the spiralling entanglement of past, present and future that whakapapa performs. Whakapapa is usually translated into English as ‘genealogy’, but it is its function as a verb—the act of placing in layers—that best describes the active practice of establishing and acknowledging connection that the concept involves. Te Hau Whakatonu: A Series of Never-Ending Beginnings, curated by Taarati Taiaroa at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, is aptly conceived of as one in a series of layers in a history of Māori art—a history which, in this telling, is insistent on its commitment to the local context of Taranaki, while also acknowledging the wider communities, narratives and associations to which the artworks refer. Te Hau Whakatonu brings together…

From the 2002 Pasifika Festival at Western Springs in Auckland, I have an enduring memory. Sylvia Marsters, on a sweltering afternoon standing at her easel, is perched on a small rise, painting detailed delicate frangipani on a small canvas. They were primarily pink with a delicate tinge of lemon. Her face was a mixture of concentration and bliss; she was in her element. The decades since have been productive for Marsters, and in 2024 her work will feature on the Bergman Gallery stand at the Aotearoa Art Fair, to be held at Auckland’s Viaduct Event Centre in April. Marsters began painting in the mid-1990s at Outreach (now Studio Toi Tu) under the tutelage of Lois Mclvor, a formidable artist and mentor who urged Marsters to seriously pursue an arts career.…

Otago Harbour (1978) is a work on paper by Joanna Margaret Paul in the Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, Dunedin. It is just over half a metre high, under a metre wide, in pencil and acrylic paint, with pasted-on paper carrying additional drawn and printed imagery. These various methods of representing show the different ways Paul connected to, and experienced, her environment—conceptually, corporeally and emotionally. Insofar as it draws attention to the act of documenting and making, as much as the ostensible subject, Otago Harbour is a sophisticated and significant work in the context of New Zealand art in 1978, and rewards extended analysis. This article is a start. Joanna Margaret Paul first lived in Dunedin in 1970, in Port Chalmers, having completed her Diploma in Fine Arts at…

With the passing of Bill Milbank the many artists who interacted with him over the 27 years of his tenure as director of the Sarjeant Gallery have lost a loyal and inspiring colleague, and friend. Curatorially speaking, Bill came from the wrong side of the tracks; he was not from an intellectual background of art history and aesthetics, and he held no degree in the higher theories of art production, but he did possess a great sensitivity to the aspirations of the artists that he met. A sensitivity that I was privileged to benefit from on several occasions, so this is really not an obituary, but a celebration of my and many other artists’ involvement with Bill. I will leave it to others to list in detail all Bill’s many…

What can be learnt from water? Cyclone Gabrielle brought its power to bear last year, inscribing the phrase ‘atmospheric rivers’ in our memories. Sea levels are rising, and as part of the Pacific Ocean, with one of the longest coastlines in the world, we need to act. Artist Cathy Carter has been researching and working with water for over a decade. Her work is an exploration of how an engagement with this liquid medium might inform our political decisions and how we think about ourselves as humans on the planet. Carter is also a cold-water swimmer. Her own embodied engagement with the sea, often the Waitematā Harbour, is a powerful methodology for her art-making. It inspired her research for her Masters of Visual Arts presentation Immersion and Emergence at AUT…

It is a challenging time for our public art institutions, with galleries required to cater to vast audiences, whilst being judged on how many visitors they can get through the door in order to win funding. Add a culture war to the context of needing to appeal to groups of school children alongside arts professionals and it becomes an almost impossible task for curators. However, Melanie Oliver and her curatorial assistant Jane Wallace have managed to capture important aspects of the current Zeitgeist, including the role artistic identities play in contemporary art, as well as emotion and new ways of thinking about materiality. Springtime is Heartbreak has offerings which allow different types of visitors to take different things away from the exhibition. This means that there are myriad threads that…

Auckland Robbie Fraser Focus Fever Two Rooms, 6 October-4 November MICHAEL DUNN Geometric abstraction is a style of painting that has a relatively small but distinguished place in New Zealand contemporary practice. Its best-known local exponent is arguably the late Gordon Walters (1919-1995). Originating in Europe, its lineage has been traced back to Mondrian and his followers in the early twentieth century. Robbie Fraser’s show Focus Fever can be seen as a contemporary take on geometric abstraction by an artist who knows its history and is aware that its heyday was back in the 1960s and 1970s, most famously when op art became fashionable. His term Masculine Steampunk in one of his titles for the paintings in the show can be read as a witty allusion to the anachronistic feel…

Wharenui Harikoa comes from a shared epiphanous moment between lovers: Lissy and Rudi RobinsonCole’s manifestation of a love supreme in the form of a life-size crocheted wharenui (meeting house), a fluorescent woollen beacon transmitting joy to the world. Its entry into Te Ao Marama (the world) took place over a month of stitching all the previously made parts together on Ngati Wairere land at Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato. Like all wharenui, there are depictions of atua (deities in Maori cosmology), recent and distant tūpuna (ancestors), various whetū (stars) from the Matariki constellation and pou (poles) made in collaboration with indigenous artists from Aotearoa, the USA and Iceland (Sami people). Frankly, the kupu (language) I feel compelled to use to describe Wharenui Harikoa is unashamedly sentimental, using words…

Books Dear Colin, Dear Ron: The Selected Letters of Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly by Peter Simpson Te Papa Press, Wellington 2024 MICHAEL DUNN Nobody has written more extensively on Colin McCahon in recent years than Peter Simpson. His landmark two-volume study published in 2019 seems almost definitive in its detail and comprehensiveness. Now, when the field appeared to be fully covered, he has produced another remarkable publication that reproduces much of the extensive correspondence between McCahon and his close friend and long-term patron and supporter Ron O’Reilly. Simpson points out that there are 360 or so surviving letters nearly equally divided between them, the first dating to 1944 and the last to 1981. Although McCahon was a prolific letter-writer, his correspondence with O’Reilly was probably his most prolonged and…