Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2025 i Art New Zealand

In 1981, when I was 25 years old, my first art-teaching job was a position at Henderson High School. Philippa Blair also taught there, so we would carpool each morning. The trip from central Tāmaki to Henderson was over an hour, as the motorway only started at Pt Chevalier. We would talk, laugh, and destress after a day of teaching art to classes of 30 school kids. She spoke of her two daughters and her upcoming painting shows; I admired how she kept all the balls in the air, motherhood and a committed studio practice—she was a rising force in the local art scene. I learnt from her how to be an artist and a good art teacher. Philippa was flamboyant. This was reflected in her work, her great clothes…

John Parker is an Auckland-based ceramicist who has been exhibiting for 58 years. He gained an MA from London's Royal College of Art in 1975, and received a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2010. He is also a busy theatre set designer, with many credits, dating from 1984 to the present. In 2016 Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery hosted Cause And Effect, a major retrospective that celebrated his 50 years as a potter. The last time that Douglas Lloyd Jenkins interviewed Parker was 2016, noting back then that he was deep in an investigation of the colour blue for the Beyond Gravity works. John Parker: I'm really going through a black phase now. I almost called an exhibition His Dark Materials which I might still do. I like…

One of the big storylines in the Western canon is a woman's quest to find a romantic partner. Love, sex, money, attraction and compatibility are all in play. In Jane Austen's Regency novels we are sharply aware of the economic drivers behind the hunt to find Mr Right. In that unequal society, failure to secure a husband could spell life in poverty as an ‘old maid’, living on the charity of relatives or working as a governess. Marriage alliances between families were also at stake. Yet Austen's women, like the female leads of today's Bridgerton television series, are, in part, compelling because they are holding out for more. They want a husband but even more they want mutual love and esteem from their men.1 In this early quest for equality…

If you ever needed an excuse to visit Whanganui, Aotearoa's only UNESCO City of Design, the newly reopened Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery is it. Already hailed by National Geographic as one of the world's top 20 cultural hotspots for 2024, the revamped gallery is a triumph of co-design and curatorial ambition, backed by ferocious fundraising. Most exciting is the glamorous new extension―Te Pātaka o Tā Te Atawhai Archie John Taiaroa, designed by Warren and Mahoney's principal architect Ralph Roberts, and co-designers Te Kāhui Toi o Tūpoho led by Cecelia Kumeroa. In contrast to the gleaming white of the spruced-up Ōamaru stone that clads Donald Hosie's original 1919 dome-topped Greek cross, the extension is a black beauty. It is cloaked in polished granite trapezoidal panels, the glossy surfaces etched…

How an artist expresses himself is more important than subject matter. The subjects are only the vehicle, the props to make a visual impression. The feeling of the print depends on technique. And when you express something, it is feeling really. There's nothing else to express, really, other than feelings. Gary Tricker, 19791 For over 50 years, Gary Tricker was dedicated to the art of printmaking. His technical skill alongside the wit and humour that infused so many of his works won him admirers worldwide. Tricker was utterly dedicated to his craft. He designed and built his own printing press.2 Working alone, he had control over every stage of the process and was extremely precise in his requirements for inks, paper and copper plates.3 Born in 1938, Tricker suffered from…

Braunias was one tough rooster, an obdurate bugger, unexpectedly struck down a few days before Christmas. His sudden departure leaves a 40-year career as a nationally acclaimed artist. No other achievement need be registered as he regarded any other endeavour as inimical to the singular pursuit of his artistic practice. For him, this quest was entirely normal and something that should also be yours, that is, had you the courage. The artist's early career success was characterised by exuberant rudeness. Braunias cultivated material rawness via an abrasive pastiche of abstract expressionistic brushwork and coupled this with an irrepressible desire to skew pretentiousness. Notably he was the first to wheedle an image of an anonymous All Black into the artistic canon. Elevating the vernacular became a sustaining motivation and a hallmark…

The emotive power of memory, the absences caused by its loss, and the enduring power of kaitiakitanga (guardianship, protection) form the centre around which Thirteen Months of Memories turns. This collaborative exhibition presents a series of 13 works that combine paintings made by Huhana Smith (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga) with custom-made sculptural frames, hand-constructed by Ciaran Banks. Smith and Banks situate the project within a dual conceptual framework that brings together kaitiakitanga with personal explorations of memory loss. In the wall text, Smith describes the project as ‘a personalised kaupapa on shared memory loss’, a process that has had a profound impact on both artists’ lives, albeit in quite different ways. Banks, an artist and woodworker, has experienced lifelong short-term memory loss following complications caused by brain…

Immersion III, a show of 21 works in mixed media by Peter Panyoczki, is a sophisticated collection by an artist less well known than one would expect, considering his career extends back to 1979. The exhibition at Artis Gallery is the third under the title Immersion and some references in this text refer to Immersion 1 and 2 as well. The artist has exhibited widely internationally and received critical attention from writers such as Wystan Curnow and Swiss art historian Beat Wyss. Artis Gallery will show his work at the Aotearoa Art Fair in May this year. Born in 1953 in Budapest, Hungary, Panyoczki belongs to the diaspora after the revolution of 1956 that led his parents to settle in Switzerland. He grew up there and studied German literature and…

The light-hearted, almost playful informality of this exhibition's introductory text panel sets the scene-evidence of a shift in curatorial practice, a move away from the more traditional style of wall-texts in public galleries. As this institution's lead curator, and curator of this exhibition, Felicity Milburn's intent is not to undermine any works in Dummies & Doppelgängers, but rather to expand, and tease out threads of meaning in a relatable and audience-friendly fashion. In fact, the extended text panels throughout the show are refreshingly lucid, occasionally asking provocative questions of the viewer. Milburn is out to share the fun and, at times, take us on a wild ride of assumed identities, known and unknown, as well as imagined. So, how do we navigate and respond? Dummies & Doppelgängers comprises 40 contemporary…

Auckland Lubaina Himid & Michael Parekōwhai Prompts Artspace Aotearoa, 1 February–17 April SAMUEL TE KANI Prompts is not a showcasing of two established artists, and the late style that comes with that, so much as it is a timely archiving of two malcontents, whose early (urgent, rugged) styles are all too relevant again. A litmus for a world backsliding. A circular tolling of the alarm bells. Comprising works from Lubaina Himid (England, born in Tanzania) and Michael Parekōwhai (Ngāriki Rotoawe, Ngāti Whakarongo, New Zealand), the pieces arrive with their themes of ethnic (mis)representation and cultural assimilation as pertinent today as they were when first shown, respectively. If only because race baiting remains a mainstream strategy in politics. Is in fact the thrust of our current and allegedly centrist government, who…

British writer Robert Macfarlane described it as a thought-experiment, a ‘photo-negative flip’ inviting readers to blank out the interior landmasses of a map to imagine instead the sea as land, a shared space, a corridor, criss-crossed with stories and travel routes bordered by ‘a continuous territory of outwards-facing coastal settlements’.1 Macfarlane was thinking about the Atlantic Ocean when he wrote his 2012 book The Old Ways but, for much of his career, Christchurch sculptor Graham Bennett has turned his gaze to the Pacific Ocean, exploring systems of navigation, voyaging, place-making and cultural exchange. In doing so, writes art historian Robin Woodward in Graham Bennett: Around Every Circle, he explores the connections ‘between people and places, between cultural ideas, and the relationship of humankind with the ancient Earth itself’.2 That relationship,…

A characteristic feature of the major art museums of Europe is the sight of artists at work at easels set up in front of Old Masters. The copying of paintings, subject to the critical eye of the passing public, has been a long-standing part of Western art education. Intended to give the student a first-hand appreciation of composition, colour and tonal qualities, it was necessarily preceded by a rigorous art-school regime of academic drawing, based on plaster casts of antique statues and anatomy in the life room. In this age of appropriation and sampling, Auckland artist Martin Ball has added another dimension to the reworking of historical imagery. Unlike the traditional copyists, his paintings are not produced in situ but in his Sandringham studio, and so are necessarily derived from…

The canonised artist demands his own vault. Scuffed, worn, faded, pitted, sometimes scribbled-over or briefly annotated, and occasionally pristine in appearance, the items from the Hōne Papita Rukura (Ralph) Hotere Collection on show in the Reed Gallery of the Dunedin Public Library Kā Kete Wānaka o Ōtepoti until 16 March 2024 convey a sense of scraps and fragments—but also a suggestion of holy relics. Mostly drawing on the artist's personal library, which was donated to the public library by Hotere's widow, the artist Mary McFarlane, in October 2021, this is an exhibition intended to offer other angles on the multifarious Hotere, who died on 24 February 2013 at the age of 81. In the end, however, this exhibition provides not really startling illumination or fresh insight, but rather confirmation of…